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Biblical and Oriental Series 


SAMUEL A. B. MERCER, General Editor 


THE UNIVERSAL FAITH 





¥ 


“Biblical and Oriental Series 





SAMUEL A. B. MERCER, General Editor 
The object of this Series on the Bible and Oriental 


Civilization is to make the results of expert investigation 
accessible to the general public. Sometimes these results 
will be presented in the form of daily readings, and 
sometimes in that of continuous discussion. Specialists in 
every case will be employed, who will endeavor to pre- 
sent their subjects in the most effective and profitable way. 


THE Livinc RELIGIONS OF THE WoRLD 
By John A. Maynard 
THE Boox or GENEsis FoR BIBLE CLASSES AND PRI- 
VATE STUDY 
By Samuel A. B. Mercer 
THE GrowTH oF RELicious AND Mora. IDEAS IN 
Ecypt 
By Samuel A. B. Mercer 
ReE.icious AND Mora IpDEAs IN BABYLONIA AND As- 
SYRIA 
By Samuel A. B. Mercer 
Lire AND GRowTH OF ISRAEL 
By Samuel A. B. Mercer 
TUTANKHAMEN AND EGYPTOLOGY 
By Samuel A. B. Mercer 
A Survey oF HEBREW EDUCATION 
By John A. Maynard 
THE REcovery OF ForGcoTTEN EMPIRES 
By Samuel A. B. Mercer 
THe Universat Farry: Comparative Religion from the 
Christian Standpoint 
By H. H. Gowen 
THe BirtH oF JUDAISM 
By John A. Maynard (in preparation). 






MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING COMPANY 


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A \ at Wige ie 
XPM il 


i ~~” od 
3 / h ie) ty | errs E 
PAT CORES 7 0) 
THE UNIVERSALSPAITH 
ae Sh a er 
¢ im Font CE 
oil Sn ah 


COMPARATIVE RELIGION FROM THE 
CHRISTIAN STANDPOINT 


y By the 
REV. H. H. GOWEN, D.D., F.R.As.Soc. 


MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
MILWAUKEE, WIS. 


A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. 
LONDON 


COPYRIGHT BY 
MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO, 
1926 


TO THE 


RT. REV. EDWIN MAKIN CROSS, D.D. 


“God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in 
the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, 
hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son, 
whom He appointed heir of all things, through Whom 
also He made the worlds; Who being the effulgence of 
His glory, and the very image of His substance, and 
upholding all things by the word of His power, when 
He had made purification of sins, sat down on the right 
hand of the Majesty on high.” Heb. i 1-3. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

. WHat We Mean By UNIVERSAL Rz- 
WAGON yal Wie due ky ema Ulta ie 
. Tue CHRIST IN PRIMITIVE RELIGION. 25 
Hie CHRIST INVd UDATS My Wy Woe WAT 
. Girts at THE CHRIST CRADLE. . . 73 
w/THE GiIrT OF THD BAST was 3 D8 
PIOCHRIAT THE ANSWER) 400 0G Ge a tele abe 
» LHp Onrist or, History...) 0... 142 
. “TH Curist THat Is to Be’. . . 161 
. Tom TRIUMPHANT Issup . . . . 183 


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ONE Oa el 





FOREWORD 


There is in China a kind of poetry known as 
the “stop short,” so-called because, while the poem 
itself is brief, it is desired that the words should 
serve as a spring-board for the imagination to 
suggest things not easily to be written down. 

The present effort is intended to be a “stop 
short” in this sense. 

Much has been written to show the uniqueness 
of Christianity. Writers might be named by the 
score who have published books on “Christ and 
other Masters” in order to contrast the quality of 
Christian faith and practice with those of other 
religions, exalting the truth of the former by the 
more unsparing condemnation of the latter. The 
Christian world for the most part has displayed 
little liking for any sympathetic association with 
the pantheons of paganism. 

Where writers on comparative religions have 
been willing to show the kinship of Christian 
creed and cult with those of other systems, it has 
generally been with a view to lowering the claims 
of Christianity by explaining all on a naturistic 
hypothesis. 

The intention of the present book is both to 

Ix 


x The Universal Faith 


show the uniqueness of the Christian faith and its 
essential and vital relationship with all earlier 
religions. This, moreover, out of the profoundest 
belief that we can only give Christianity its 
proper historical setting as we recognize Christ 
to be the manifestation of the eternal purpose of 
God, the Logos Who in His Person, His Method, 
and His Mission, reveals the principles of the Di- 
vine working in the Universe. 

The plan of the following chapters is ambitious, 
in spite of the brevity of the treatment. It was 
desired to furnish an outline such as might be 
grasped by the mind as in a single picture rather 
than to obscure that outline by much detail. No 
one is more aware of failure to rise to the height 
of the intent than is the writer, but he sends forth 
what has been written with the prayer that it 
may help some to see something of the scope and 
universality of the religion which is too often di- 
minished to something local and provisional, a 
mere rival, though with better credentials, of the 
faiths of other lands and times. 


CHAPTER I 


WHAT WE MEAN BY UNIVERSAL RELIGION 


“A thousand years 
Are but as yesterday, even unto these. 
How shall men doubt His empery over time, 
Whose dwelling is a deep so absolute 
That we can only find Him in our souls? 
For there, despite Copernicus, each may find 
The centre of all things. There He lives and reigns. 
There infinite distance into nearness grows, 
And infinite majesty stoops to dust again.” 
—Watchers of the Sky, Noyes. 


SYNOPSIS 


Introduction—Is Christianity a “local thing’ ?—our self- 
imposed limitations in religion—necessity of momentum 
from the past to give confidence in the future—what 
power lies behind our faith? 

The contributions of Theology and Science to the idea 
of the Universe—the parallel between social develop- 
ment and the theological—city-states and polytheism— 
national religion—monotheism and the imperial idea— 
other elements making towards universal religion—the 
inspiration of the individual—the place of the Jew in 
religious development—Jewish history an epitome. 

The three paths to universal religion—1. the Exclusive 
idea—illustrations of its fallacy—2. the Eclectic—a con- 


2 The Universal Faith 


tradiction to the method of Nature—3. the Evolutionary 
—popular misconceptions—not opposed to Revelation. 

May we consider Christianity evolutionary ?7—“‘Adam 
on his way to be born”—the Evangelists of Chartres— 
O. T. evidence—witness of the N. T. writers—“by divers 
portions and in divers manners’”—the testimony of Christ 
—S. Paul at Antioch, in Lycaonia, at Athens—cosmic 
character of the Bible revelation—the ancestry of the 
Christ. 

Universal religion in relation to human nature—the 
religion of emotion—the religion of reason—the religion 
of will—the mischief of defect and of excess. 

The evolution of feeling from fear to love—the evolu- 
tion of reason from aetiological guesswork to science— 
the religion of the will from servile obedience to filial co- 
operation. 

Will Christianity be found to correspond with such a 
conception of the universal?—our survey of the subject, 
what it means—the one purpose, in the end and in the 
way, in Creation and in the Cross. 


N the first part of Thomas Hardy’s powerful 

poem, The Dynasts, there is a passage which 

rankles whenever I read it. It is that in which the 
poet speaks of— 


“A local thing called Christianity, 

Which the wild dramas of this wheeling sphere 
Include, with divers other such, in dim 
Pathetical and brief parenthesis.” 


I confess that if I were compelled to conceive 
thus of Christianity my faith therein might come 
dangerously near to suffering eclipse. Yet sadder 
than the half-cynical references to Christianity 
which are the result of neo-pagan indifference or 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 3 


ignorance, is the limitation placed upon the signif- 
icance and scope of Christianity by those who 
profess themselves its exponents. When Christians 
themselves make of their religion “a local thing,” 
it is time to examine the place of that religion in 
a universe where (to quote Hardy again )— 

“The systems of the suns go sweeping on 

With all their many mortal’d planet train 

In mathematic roll unceasingly.” 

It is fairly obvious that one chief need of re- 
ligion to-day is that it possess momentum enough 
from an intelligent relation to the past to afford 
vision enough for confidence in the infinite future. 
It is because we accept self-imposed limitations 
on our conceptions of religion, such as make it 
merely a private solace, or a social stimulus, or a 
matter of race pride, that we flag and fail. 

Some time ago, on the Yangtse, an English 
naval captain, in a mere egg-shell of a gun-boat, 
the Cockchafer (at which I was inclined to 
laugh when I saw it, on account of its obvious 
unsuitableness for strenuous tasks), steamed 
boldly up to a big Chinese city and threatened to 
bombard it for the murder of an American citizen. 
The officer compelled the delivery of the culprits, 
saw to their punishment, and forced the Governor 
to march in the funeral procession of the victim. 
How was he able to do this? Surely not out of 
confidence in his own valor, or trusting in the 
effectiveness of his tiny craft, but because he knew 
that the almost illimitable power of a great Em- 


4 The Universal Faith 


pire was behind him in his deed, a power of which 
he was for the moment the representative and ex- 
pression. 

Can we, looking backward and forward, feel 
at least as well assured of the momentum behind 
our personal religious life and of the power at 
our disposal to bring all to a happy and success- 
ful end? Unless we can do this, our religion must 
be, to that extent, defective. 

To present anew such a view of Christianity as 
may show Christ in very truth the Alpha and 
Omega, I am trying to assemble the thoughts col- 
lected into these pages. For, unless Christianity 
be eternal in time and absolute in quality and 
universal in its reach, it sinks into being after all 
“a local thing” which, like the religion of the in- 
dividual, is liable to faint and expire. 

What we call the Universe is a postulate both 
of modern Science and of modern Theology. It 
is not easy to say how far Theology or how far 
Science have each contributed to our present be- 
lief that all we see or think of is part of a great 
“Oneness.” Some think that Theology reached this 
conclusion before there was scientific knowledge 
of the fact. It is sufficient here to acknowledge 
that in either department, contribution has been 
made towards the result. As soon as Science pro- 
claims its belief in “one law,” Theology adds its 
own conviction of “one God,” and the faith which 
from the revelation of the past foresees the future 
completes the story: 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 5 


“One Law, one God, one element, 
And one far-off Divine event 
To which the whole Creation moves.’ 


To study the growth of this idea of a Universe 
from the point of view of Science is outside our 
plan, but it is interesting at the outset to note 
how closely the political and social development 
of mankind have kept pace with, stimulated by 
and stimulating, the religious consciousness of 
the world. 

In primitive times the family would be the unit 
and the family totem would represent its Lares 
and Penates, while the family across the river 
(rwalis) would represent everything alien and 
hostile, both temporal and spiritual. 

When the family stockade had grown into the 
city and the city wall, the city god would be repre- 
sented visibly by the priest-king, as in the case of 
the Sumerian patesi, while the invisible deity 
would be thought of as melek (king) or baal 
(lord). 

Next would come, for mutual protection or for 
partnership in raids upon their neighbors, the 
federation of city-states, thus creating the nation, 
with its chief city and its chief ruler among sub- 
ordinate cities and princes, and with its hierarchy 
of gods headed by the god of the chief city, now 
transformed into a national deity. 

Still later, when successful defence had given 
the nation the means for wide-spread offence, 
would come the empire, bringing in its train the 


6 The Universal Faith 


conception of a deity with attributes transcend- 
ing national and racial boundaries. Thus, in 
Egypt, the Empire of the 18th dynasty bred the 
monotheistic (or at least monolatrous) revolu- 
tion of Amenhotep IV. Similarly the empire of the 
Achaemenians made natural the idea of a god 
with the same qualities of universality which had 
been claimed by the “king of kings.” So again the 
empire of Alexander and the Seleucids. And, once 
again, following in the path marked out by the 
Seleucids, the Roman Empire came to give a 
catholic and oecumenical turn to theology cor- 
responding to the political development. It was 
plain that where “peoples, nations, and lan- 
guages” were gathered together under one civil 
rule, they could no longer remain subject to the 
limitations of their old theology. 

Of course, there were other, and more specific- 
ally religious, factors in the development of this 
idea of an universal God. There are in every age 
gifted and inspired spirits which by “the soul’s 
invincible surmise” overleap the more prosaic 
processes whereby intellectual conviction is ob- 
tained. The Greek, even with his cultured con- 
tempt for the barbarian world, could say of God, 
“He is our Father; we are all His children.” The 
caste-ridden Hindu, even out of the most intoler- 
ant of sects, could declare, “There are no castes 
in the presence of Civa for we are all his chil- 
dren.” The Buddhist, it may be “out of a kind 
of tolerant pity or good will, which the higher- 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 7 


minded should cultivate in order to reach seren- 
ity,” though he proclaimed no god for the solace 
of human suffering, yet declared for the unity of 
the world order, and hung as it were a great bell 
in the heavens calling men to the following of a 
world religion. 

These, however, are but as scattered hints and 
suggestions of a divine purpose of which the main 
stream shows unmistakably the general direction, 
a direction which is more easily to be studied in 
the lives of communities than in the experience of 
individuals. If living matter is educable matter, so 
living communities are educable communities in 
the several degrees determined in the providence 
of God by such things as race, history, geographi- 
cal location, intellectual and spiritual gifts, char- 
acter, and mission. 

Thus it is no mere accident that religiously no 
history is more valuable, as helping to bridge the 
gulf between the theology which is limited and 
imperfect and that which is universal and abso- 
lute, than the history of the Jew. To this we shall 
come back more particularly in a succeeding chap- 
ter, but here it is necessary to say that the ex- 
perience of the Jewish people, up to a certain 
point, is a kind of epitome of the experience of 
mankind. Judaism had its early tribal state with 
its primitive animism. From this, in the religious 
revolution under Moses, she rose to nationality 
with a national God, Yahweh, who was to be her 
own particular champion in the land she was en- 


8 The Universal Faith 


abled by His aid to conquer. Then, unlike the 
Egyptian and the Roman, not by expansion into 
an empire, but by the loss of nationality, Judaism 
was taught to worship a God who had brought 
Syria out of Kir and the Philistines out of Caph- 
tor as well as Israel out of Egypt, and to gain a 
theological vision she was privileged, even 
through her own loss of territorial nationality, 
to hand on to the peoples of the earth. It was a 
crisis nobly used, for with enlarged conceptions 
of God came corresponding enlargement of the 
idea of the Church and of Humanity. No greater 
triumph of experience could be imagined than that 
the little people which had been crushed out of 
all semblance of nationality by the brute might 
of Babylon, should be able to sing from its Cal- 
vary of the coming of the Gentile to grasp the 
skirts of the Jew in order to know God: 


“See a long line thy spacious courts adorn: 
See future sons and daughters yet unborn, 
In crowding ranks on every side arise, 
Demanding life, impatient for the skies.” 


But instead of following at once the story of 
the development of universal religion, as much 
more wonderful than the story of the development 
of life in general as the life of the spirit is more 
wonderful than that of the body, we must at this 
point ask ourselves certain questions as to the 
paths by which we are to approach the subject. 
There are, it appears to the writer, three pos- 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 9 


sible conceptions of the way to a Universal Re- 
ligion. 

1. The first is what we may call the Exclusive. 
way, by which is meant a method of securing 
the universal by excluding and eliminating all 
but one of a number of competing systems. On 
this theory one deals with religions as the Maso- 
retic editors of the Old Testament Scriptures 
dealt with the various readings of the then exist- 
ing Hebrew MSS, or as the Companions of the 
Prophet dealt with the varying copies of the 
Quran, with the result that the present uniform 
texts are more confusing and of course less ac- 
curate than would have been the perpetuation of 
many textual differences. Similarly, men have 
argued that if all religions but one were sup- 
pressed, the victorious creed and cult would have 
indisputable title to universality. Missionaries of 
all faiths have occasionally taken this attitude. 
I have a copy of an old Indian missionary’s de- 
scription of the gods of Southern India which was 
refused publication by the Society to which he 
was accredited because “he was sent to India to 
destroy the gods, not to write about them.” Far 
be it from me to deny that he who would promote 
the cause of universal religion must be at times 
a good and courageous iconoclast. “When the gods 
arrive,” the half-gods must go, and doubtless men 
like Boniface had ample warrant for smashing 
the images which held back the Frisian pagans 
from loftier views. But we must be careful lest 


10 The Universal Faith 


in smiting at the religion of primitive people we 
smite where God has not left Himself without 
witness rather than at that which is literally a 
superstitio, that is, something which has outlasted 
its use. The story of Paphnutius casting a stone at 
the Sphinx and hearing from the smitten lips of 
stone the gently breathed name of “Christ” is a 
warning to those who would heedlessly destroy 
all outside the limits of their own (often nar- 
row) creed. 

2. The second path is that which we may name 
the Eclectic, the picking out of elements here and 
there from various creeds.to make a kind of.cos- 
mopolitan patchwork with appeal to all. The 
method has had special attraction for some, par- 
ticularly in countries which have a syncretic cul- 
ture. It was the Persian way, from the time of 
Mani and Mazdak down to the recent days of 
Babism and Bahai. It may prove to be the Ameri- 
can way, unless we perceive the futility of the 
effort, and stop cluttering up our religious life 
with the wrecks of short-lived systems of this type. 
For, even if men doubt the wisdom of Horace, 
who taught the folly of so combining diverse 
parts that turpiter atrum desinat in piscem mulier 
formosa superne, we might learn from science 
that such is not the organic and natural way to 
make anything that is to live. 

3. The only other possible path is that which 
we call the EHvolutionary. It may seem strange at 
this date that it is still necessary to guard oneself 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 11 


from the implication that the evolutionary method 
of reaching universal religion must be a method 
deprived of the purpose and direction and power 
of God. No study of process, however deep or high, 
pushed back howsoever far, or howsoever pro- 
jected forward, can be effective which does not 
feel continuously the mystery that lies in and be- 
yond the process. As a little child, gazing at the 
sun-suffused sky at even-tide, expressed her 
thought, “God is shining through.” To use fa- 
miliar words: 

“A fire-mist and a planet, 

A erystal and a cell, 

A jelly-fish and a saurian, 

And eaves where cave-men dwell; 

Then a sense of love and duty, 

And a face turned from the clod; 

Some call it Evolution, 

And others call it God.” 

So in speaking of,an evolutionary conception of 
universal religion, speak not of a conception 
which represents the Universe as hurtling through 
time and space, uncontrolled, like some train with 
a dead engineer at the engine, but as one which 
needs God in it and with it all the way from the 
first primal impulse of “the love that made the 
sun and all the stars.” It is God, throughout faith- 
ful to Himself, exhaustless energy harnessed to an 
infinite idea, in the animal which “climbs up its 
own genealogical tree,” as well as in the spirit 
which seeks to rise to closer coéperation with a 
God with Whom kinship is established. 


12 The Universal Faith 


It is obvious that such a conception of religion 
will supply us with adequate reason for regarding 
all history as “a novel with a plot,” all the past 
as the sphere for the operation of that “Holy 
Spirit of assimilation” which we call revelation, 
all the present, with all its apparent tragedy, all 
its waste, as part of that act of creation which is 
itself limitation and Passion, all the future, as 
the assured triumph of Him Who sees from the 
beginning to the end the travail of His soul and 
its reward. The story of the Universe is one story, 
whether from above we regard it as the revela- 
tion of a transcendent God, or from below as the 
evolution of a creation in which the Divine ele- 
ment is necessarily immanent. Not only is “the 
moral advance of a man a divine unfolding and 
growth,” but the physical too, God’s secret work- 
ing at the web and woof of the flesh that our 
bodies might become at length the shrine of the 
All-Holy. 

Let us now come to the question, so important 
for us to-day in America: May we regard Chris- 
tianity as such an evolutionary product? It 
stands to reason that the Christianity which is 
simply looked upon as one true religion over 
against all other faiths as false, or the Chris- 
tianity which is esteemed a kind of medley, made 
up of the shreds and patches of Judaism and the 
Mystery cults, must be a very different thing, with 
a very different destiny, from the Christianity 
which claims to be co-extensive with the whole 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 13 


purpose of God, something, in fact, which may 
fitly be called a cosmic epic, in a sense far trans- 
cending even the Divina Commedia of Dante. 

I need hardly say that there have been dark 
ages in Christian history when the first concep- 
tion of Christianity was only too common. Per- 
haps there are still those to-day to whom all the 
gods of other religions are nought but devils and 
all earlier forms of ministry or sacrament but the 
blasphemous parodies of Satan. There are again 
those to-day for whom Christianity is sufficiently 
explained as a piece of eclecticism, elements bor- 
rowed from Jew and Persian, from Buddhist and 
Greek. But, if we ask, What is Christianity’s own 
claim, in order that it may be the answer to all 
men’s prayers and the supply of all men’s needs, 
the reply will not be an uncertain one. 

In one of the old Mystery Plays a figure crossed 
the stage at the beginning of the performance 
which “was explained as that of “Adam on his 
way to be born.” Similarly, before the curtain of 
the New Testament lifts, we are made aware that 
if the light of the Cross is to stream infinitely 
forward, it must also illuminate the way back 
to the beginning. The very fact that the New Tes- 
tament is preceded by an Old Testament stretch- 
ing back to its opening words, “In the beginning 
God created the heavens and the earth,” will sug- 
gest this thought. Mr. Henry Adams tells us of 
that window in the Cathedral of Chartres which 
depicts somewhat grotesquely the four Evangel- 


14 The Universal Faith 


ists riding pig-a-back upon the shoulders of the 
Old Testament prophets, S. Matthew on Jeremiah, 
S. Mark on Daniel, S. Luke on Isaiah, and S. John 
on Hzekiel. The grotesqueness conceals a truth 
maintained by Christ Himself when He expounded 
to His disciples that the Law, the Prophets, and 
the Psalms were full of “things concerning Him- 
self.” 

But the Old Testament goes back further than 
to the history of the Jew. The real scope of the 
Christian revelation is best summarized in that 
wonderfully comprehensive statement of the first 
chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “God, hav- 
ing of old time spoken unto the fathers in the 
prophets by divers portions and in divers man- 
ners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto 
us in His Son, Whom He appointed heir of all 
things, through Whom also He made the worlds.” 

Such comprehension is the basis of the claim of 
Christ, “Other sheep I have which are not of this 
fold,” and of the commission (a true tradition, 
even if a faulty text) to the apostles: “Go ye 
into all the world and make disciples of every 
creature.” It is the basis also for the missionary 
strategy of the greatest of the apostles. 

When S. Paul was testifying to the Jews, as in 
the synagogue at Antioch, it was to the past his- 
tory of the Jew that he referred that he might es- — 
tablish the reasons for accepting his gospel. But 
when the Apostle came to preachamong the heathen 
of Lycaonia (Acts xiv 11 ff.), he had then no need 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 15 


to recite for. them the witness of God to the Jew, 
since they too had their own experience, the pre- 
paratio evangelica, in the fact that God “left not 
Himself without witness, in that He did good, 
and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful sea- 
sons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.” 
And again, when speaking to the Athenians, the 
Apostle, with inspired common sense as well as 
out of that grasp of what his faith implied, 
preached neither from the lessons of Jewish his- 
tory nor from the lessons of natural religion, but 
found in “your own poets” the proper testimony 
to the truths he uttered. 

It is, once again, the basis for the claims made 
by many of the wisest and most far-seeing of the 
Christian fathers. I quote but one passage, from 
S. Clement of Alexandria, as follows: “It is clear 
that the same God to Whom we owe the Old and 
New Testament gave also to the Greeks their 
Greek philosophy by which the Almighty is glori- 
fied among the Greeks” (Strom. VI v 42). 

The cosmic character of the Divine revelation 
which culminates in Christ is plain from the plan 
of the whole Bible, Old Testament and New to- 
gether. 

First comes the base line of Creation, no less 
comprehensive than “heaven and earth,” all the 
work of God’s Spirit operating upon Chaos. Yet, 
step by step, we find the Divine purpose manifest- 
ing itself by selection, to the revealing of that 
topmost point of creation in which God may most 


16 The Universal Faith 


fully reveal Himself, the summit peak of Revela- 
tion as it is also the summit peak of Evolution, 
the one exactly coinciding with the other. So the 
animal world is dismissed from Eden, animal con- 
tent now replaced by human discontent, the child 
of the race starting on his upward way, weak and 
frail as yet, but destined to find along the wilder- 
ness path, through discipline of toil and pain and 
death, that obedience to the inner voice which 
shall make his final peace. So again we find man- 
kind sifted, race by race, family by family, in- 
dividual by individual, in order that the seed of 
the future may be discovered, that “standard 
man,” that ozmovdaios avnp, of whom the Greek 
philosopher writes. 

Thus the apex of the Old Testament triangle 
ends where the apex of the New Testament tri- 
angle begins, in order that the seed sown in death 
may, age by age, enlarge its precious harvest, in 
order that the record at last may end with a base 
line like that with which the record starts, “heaven 
and earth,”—only a new heaven and a new earth, 
with the sea of Chaos “no more” for ever, “all 
things new.” 

What an ancestry for Christianity and the 
Christ! When the Prophet asks his question, “Who 
shall declare His generation?” may not we, for 
our part, answer with a conviction no other age 
has known, that we trace it not merely, with S. 
Matthew, to Abraham or with other genealogies 
back to Adam? But rather do we trace it back 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 17 


to Caliban and the Heidelberg man; we trace it 
to the first dawn of the thing we call personality ; 
we trace it back further still to the birth of the 
cell; we trace it again to the first appearance of 
the atom; and back still again to the development 
of the elements among the stars. At that point, 
or at any other, it is still necessary to complete 
our genealogy with the words S. Luke employs 
to close his own, “Which was the son of God.” 

In such a generation there is no break, no miss- 
ing link. It holds all the way from God to Christ, 
and Christ to the humblest who shall be partaker 
of His life. 

So far we have used the term Universal only in 
the time-sense and in the space-sense. It is much 
to remember the claims of Christianity in these 
two respects. But there is another way in which 
the absoluteness of an Universal religion must 
be tested. We must ask of Christianity, seeing 
that it is inevitable that Christianity stands or 
falls with the claim to be universal: Does Chris- 
tianity correspond, not only with the needs of all 
men everywhere, but also with the whole need of 
the entire man, considered as a being who is to 
be wholly redeemed in order that he may fulfil 
the Creator’s plan concerning him? 

There are three aspects of religion which have 
to be considered both separately and together: 

1. The religion of Feeling or Emotion. Some 
will say that this aspect is primary, since Reason 
is not alert until quickened by Feeling (as every 


v 


18 The Universal Faith 


teacher knows), and the Will is not moved until 
lifted by those tides of emotion which bear men 
away from their old moorings to do and dare for 
a great cause. In any case feeling is a necessary 
element in religion. The religion which is not 
“touched with emotion,’ to use the phrase of 
Matthew Arnold, wins but little acceptance. It 
is what S. Paul means when he says, “Circum- 
cision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, 
but faith which worketh by love.” 

Yet a religion of feeling apart from other ele- 
ments may be mischievous indeed, and examples 
are plentiful enough from the Bacchantes of 
Greece and the Tantric fanatics of India to the 
Holy Rollers of our own day, of religion degenerat- 
ing into license just as soon as feeling becomes un- 
disciplined and unrestrained. 

2. The Religion of Reason. The intellectual ele- 
ment too is an important and necessary element 
in religion. Our duty towards God includes the 
obligation to serve Him “with all our mind.” 
Faith is never opposed to reason but to sight, 
which is a very different thing. 

Yet here too is danger, not in excess of reason, 
but in elevating human reason, with all its in- 
evitable limitations, to the place of the divine, as 
the French revolutionists enthroned her as a god- 
dess on the altar of Notre Dame. Reason must 
“know her place’; “a higher hand must make her 
wise.” The reason of one individual, or the reason 
of an age, must not be made a measuring rod for 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 19 


generalizations beyond its range. One of the func- 
tions of reason is the recognition of that which, 
for the present, lies beyond reason. 

3. The Religion of Will. The conative, or ethi- 
cal, element too must have its place. No antino- 
mian extravagance of emotion, no enlightened 
gnosticism, may dispense with morality. “Cir- 
cumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is noth- 
ing, but the keeping of the commandments of 
God.” Morals, under the Gospel, are just as im- 
portant as under the Old Testament dispensation, 
though the moral life spring from the working of 
grace rather than from the pressure of a servile 
legalism. 

Yet, once again, we must remember that mere 
moral philosophy is not religion, and no system of 
ethics, though it be possessed with the patience 
and persistence of Confucianism, will suffice to 
regenerate or save nation or individual. 

So we see that in these matters there may be 
mischief both from defect and from excess. To 
be a whole man, that is, to enter into life neither 
halt, nor maimed, nor blind, but with two feet, 
two hands, and two eyes, is the purpose of God in 
us and for us. The supreme bliss of life is not for 
the passionless, but for those whose passions are 
brought under the dominion of the purpose of 
God, God’s lovers, not His slaves. The supreme 
bliss, again, is not for the irrational; intelligence 
is as the Latin will show, one high form of love. 
And once again, the supreme bliss is not for the 


20 The Universal Faith 


weak willed; all the visions of future reward and 
punishment, from Arda Viraf to Dante, put the 
weak willed outside the circles of disciplinary pain 
or of ecstatic joy. 

The above statement at once suggests another 
as following in its train, namely, that here too 
there must be in all religious history an evolu- 
tion : 

1. There must be an evolution of feeling, all the 
way from the sense of awe which expresses itself 
as fear, to the love which “casteth out fear.” The 
passion which is base and dark must grow through 
many stages, with room for emotion of many 
kinds, until it become at length that white, trans- 
figured passion which makes the very atmosphere 
of Heaven— 


“So strong that heaven, could love bid heaven farewell, 
Would turn to fruitless and unflowering hell; 

So sweet that hell, to hell could love be given, 

Would turn to splendid and sonorous heaven. 

Love that is fire within thee and light above, 

And lives by grace of nothing but of love.” 


2. There must’be an evolution of reason, all the 
way from the myth to true science, from the 
aetiological guesswork with regard to things but 
imperfectly generalized, to the dogmas, still in 
the provisional stage, which have reached accep- 
tance after the closest possible observation and 
assemblage of observations, from every region of 
that world of matter, mind, and spirit which has 
become man’s proper heritage. 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 21 


5. There must be an evolution of the ethical 
faculty, all the way from the servile obedience of 
sons and even beyond to the self-identification of 
the bride-soul with her bridegroom-lover. 

In all these lines of development, it will be seen, 
progress is not by way of suppression but by way 
of fulness, not by the crushing out of emotion, or 
by the slaying of reason, or by ethical negations 
of the “touch not,” “taste not,” “handle not” sort, 
but by the uplifting of faculty from the animal to 
the human and from the human to the divine. It is, 
to use the tremendous words of the Christian 
apostle, “to be filled with all the fulness of 
God.” 

We are setting ourselves to examine whether 
Christianity may honestly be considered as cor- 
responding to such a conception of universal re- 
ligion. Is our Christianity something, so far as 
space and time are concerned, catholic and eternal 
rather than local and temporal? Is it, so far as 
human nature is concerned, something for the 
whole man, not involving a separation into ma- 
terial and spiritual, this world and the other 
world, sacred and secular, and so on? Was the 
Christ really satisfied with the travail of His soul, 
both as He looked back over all the past and as 
He looked forward to all that was to result there- 
from to the end of time? Is His love really the im- 
pelling motive of the Divine Will that “moves the 
sun in heaven and all the stars’? 

It will be plain that we are asked to take, in 


pie The Universal Faith 


a moment of time, a view of something more than 
“the kingdoms of ai world and the glory of 
them.” 

When the British mune Exhibition at Wem- 
bley was opened several years ago, one of the most 
notable exhibits consisted of a large model of 
the world with all the different portions of the 
Empire depicted in red. It was to Englishmen 
everywhere a wonderful revelation of the far-flung 
extent and dominion of the great confederation 
of nations to which they belonged. 

But we, in still narrower space, are called upon 
to survey something immeasurably larger. We are, 
in all humility, “from heights divine of the eternal 
purpose,” to attempt some imperfect but yet prac- 
tically stimulating survey of that purpose so far 
as it has been revealed to us for the redemption 
of all mankind. 

We shall try to keep in mind this one Purpose, 
something antedating all time, a purpose which 
applies not only to the world at large but to the 
perfecting also of the individual soul. 

We shall try to keep in mind the one Force, 
the Divine Love, implicit in Creation, revealed 
in all its fulness in the Incarnation of Jesus 
Christ. 

We shall try to keep in mind the one Method 
by which that Love appeals to the world, the 
method of the Cross. 

We shall see that Method displayed in Creation 
as well as revealed on Calvary. The Cross shines 


What We Mean by Universal Religion 23 


upon Chaos “in the beginning” as when it shone 
on the hills around Jerusalem, yea, as it will 
shine in Paradise through all eternity. To quote 
from the suggestive lines of a living poet, the Gos- 
- pel of Creation is the same Gospel as that of the 
Cross: 


“Formless it was, being gold on gold, 

And void—but with that complete life 

Where music could no wings unfold, 

Till, lo, God smote the strings of strife; 
‘Myself unto Myself am Throne, 

Myself unto Myself am Thrall: 

I that am all am all alone.’ 

He said, ‘Yea, I have nothing, having all.’ . 


“‘Hnough,’ His angels moaned in fear, 

‘Father, Thy words have pierced Thy side.’ 

He whispered, ‘Roses shall grow there, 

And there must be a hawthorn-tide, 

And ferns dewy at dawn,’ and still 

They moaned, ‘Enough, the red drops bleed.’ 
‘And,’ sweet and low, ‘on every hill,’ 

He said, ‘I will have flocks and lambs to lead.’ 
His angels bowed their heads beneath 

Their wings till that great pang was gone: 
‘Pour not Thy soul out unto death,’ 

They moaned, and still His love flowed on. . . 


“He spake: ‘I have thought of a little child 
That I will have here to embark 

On small adventures in the wild, 

And front slight perils in the dark; . 


**And when he is older, he shall be 
My friend and walk here at my side; 


24 


The Universal Faith 


Or, when he wills, grow young with Me, 

And, to that happy world where once we died, 
Descending through the calm blue weather, 
Buy life once more with our immortal breath, 
And wander through the little fields together, 
And taste of Love and Death!” 


CHAPTER II 


THE CHRIST IN PRIMITIVE RELIGION 


“That in all ages 
Every human heart is human; 
That in even savage bosoms 
There are longings, yearnings, strivings, 
For the good they comprehend not; 
That the feeble hands and helpless, 
Groping blindly in the darkness, 
Trust God’s right hand in that darkness, 
And are lifted up and strengthened.” 


“To profess to give a history of religion is to presup- 
pose a spirit specifically qualified for religion. 

“There are, then, three factors in the process by which 
religion comes into being in history. First, the interplay 
of predisposition and stimulus, which in the historical 
development of man’s mind actualises the potentiality in 
the former, and at the same time helps to determine its 
form. Second, the recognition, by virtue of this very dis- 
position, of specific portions of history as the manifesta- 
tion of ‘the holy,’ with consequent modification of the 
religious experience already attained both in its quality 
and degree. And third, on the basis of the other two, the 
achieved fellowship with ‘the holy’ in knowing, feeling, 
and willing.”—Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. 


SYNOPSIS 


Christ, the Way—the term “primitive” relative—the 
use of imaginative insight—and of anthropology— 


25 


26 The Universal Faith 


Browning’s Caliban upon Setebos—the element of fear 
in primitive religion—the two objectives of primitive 
awe-—Naturism and Spiritism. 

The permanent value of Naturism—its Theology 
—animism—fetichism—polytheism—pantheism—henothe- 
ism—monotheism—Naturism and the Christian heaven 
—the cult of Naturism—omens—divination—tabu—imi- 
tative magic—mantras and sacrifices—connection of these 
with Christian institutions. 

The Theology of Spiritism—ancestor-worship—care of 
the dead—commemoration of the dead—communication 
with the dead—present value of the anthropomorphic— 
and of the theriomorphic—the fishes’ view of Heaven— 
the fact beyond the symbol. 

The permanent element in primitive conceptions of 
God—the germ of the Trinitarian idea—as to Man and 
his destiny—as to Society—the Cross in Primitive Re- 
ligion—the cry from under the Altar. 


HRIST announced Himself not only as the 
Truth and the Life, but also as the Way. Pos- 
sibly the translation of the whole passage (John 
xiv 6) would be better, “I am the True and the 
Living Way.” To the student of the history of Re- 
ligion the significance of such a statement is 
enormous: 
“Thou art the Way! 
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal, 
I cannot say 
That Thou hadst ever found my soul.” 
It is because of our belief in Christ as the Way, 
at any and every point in the history of religion, 
that—given the proper attitude—we find primi- 
tive religion necessarily and vitally linked with 
the religion of to-day and tomorrow. 


The Christ in Primitive Religion 27 


Of course, the term “primitive” is only relative. 
We know little of really primitive religion, just 
as we know little of really primitive language; 
the records of history are all too relatively recent 
in comparison with the duration of human life 
upon this planet. 

But we can get some relative understanding of 
the attitude of early mankind in the presence of 
the great surrounding mystery of things and the 
mystery of life within. By some measure of imagi- 
native insight, and by the more or less laborious 
collection of anthropological data, we are able to 
reconstruct with considerable probability of ac- 
curacy the religion of primitive man, even al- 
though we only catch up with him when he is far 
advanced along the upward path. Both of these 
methods, used coédperatively, will at least furnish 
us with much that is valuable and suggestive. 

Suppose, for example, we take such a piece of 
imaginative reconstruction as we find in Brown- 
ing’s Caliban upon Setebos, we discover at once 
much to bring us to the conclusion that Caliban 
too was among the prophets of whom Jesus de- 
clared that they spake concerning Himself. Primi- 
tive man is here already, to use the suggestive 
term of Dr. Otto, numinous, creaturely-conscious, 
by ways entirely apart from the rational, of the 
mysterium tremendum outside himself. 

While Caliban, in his body, is kicking both feet 
in the cool slush, a dawning spiritual sense is 
awake and responsive to a stimulus. Out of his 


28 The Universal Faith 


“daemonicdread” in presence of the unknown there 
is the potentiality of a reverence which will grow 
to love. Out of the respect he evinces for the tra- 
ditions received from his mother is to arise a 
capacity for fellowship in faith such as shall 
create a Church. Out of the self knowledge which 
inclines him to postulate certain things of God 
is to come that sense of kinship so triumphantly 
vindicated in the doctrine of the Incarnation. Out 
of the acts of propitiation, ritually organized, is 
to come the whole development of prayer and 
sacrifice which will fulfil our needs of commu- 
nion with a loving God. Both the creed and the 
cult of the Christian are discernible in the specu- 
lations of the man just emerging from the slime, 
as the limbs and viscera and brain of the human 
being are predictively present in the embryo. 

Summarizing the data derivable from the widest 
survey of the anthropological field, we find noth- 
ing essentially different from what has been seized 
by the intuition of the poet. 

First, we find what has generally been de- 
scribed as fear, following the famous line of the 
Latin poet Petronius, 


“Primus in orbe fecit deos timor.” 
It is that which Otto calls the sense of the nu- 
minous, that mysterium tremendum with its two 
poles of dread and attraction,—the tremendum 


and the fascinans. Others call it cosmic emotion. 
I prefer the simple term awe, the emotion which 


The Christ in Primitive Religion 29 


is undoubtedly at first largely fear, but a fear 
capable of transformation into the ecstasy of love. 
To the end, of course, fear is to have a certain 
place in religion. The sense of dread in the pres- 
ence of the infinite mystery must have its perma- 
nent value. As Goethe says (Faust 2nd. part, Iv): 
“Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil. 
Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefiihl verteuere, 
Ergriffen fiihlt er tief das Ungeheuere.” 
To supersede too rudely this element of religion 
is not only to rationalize religion unduly, but also 
to weaken its moral power over the consciences 
of men. 

But in primitive religion, Awe (or Fear) is seen 
to be felt in two directions, each of which has an 
important share in moulding the creed and in- 
stitutions and practices of religion. 

The first form of awe (not necessarily, of course, 
in time sequence) is the emotion felt by primitive 
man in the presence of the phenomena of Nature. 
It is this which has given us the word Deus, with 
all its derivatives as suggestive of the God in and 
beyond Nature. This aspect of religion, to which 
we may give the term Naturism, has given us the 
conception of a God immanent in Creation. 

The other form of awe is that which arises in 
the presence of the mystery of Death and has de- 
veloped along the lines of what we call Spiritism. 
It gives us those conceptions of God which are 
in the main derivable from the Greek word Theos, 
ultimately from a root signifying to breathe. 


30 The Universal Faith 


In the former case the spiritual element re- 
garded as supplementing the material is suggested 
by the analogy of the,wind which seems to vivify 
the natural world; in the latter case that spiritual 
element is denoted by the breath which fills or 
leaves the human body. 

It would seem to be a common error on the part 
of anthropologists to select and seize upon one of 
these two forms of awe to the neglect of the other, 
in order to build up a theory of religious origins. 
To one the sight of the stupendous marvels of 
Nature, “the spacious firmament” at night, the 
rising sun, the rolling storm-clouds, has been the 
all sufficient explanation of the fact that man is 
“incurably religious.” To another, religion is noth- 
ing but the beliefs and worship inspired by the 
fear of ghosts or by the baseless visions of the 
night. It should be clear from the outset that, in 
order to account for all the facts, both Naturism 
and Spiritism must be allowed their proper place, 
and to a large extent their separate lines of de- 
velopment. We must even have permanent room 
both for the awe which breeds mingled pride and 
humility as we stand beneath the starry vault of 
heaven, and for the awe which we feel when bend- 
ing in prayer in the presence of the dead. The 
universal religion of which we are in quest must 
be a synthesis of both evolutions, not academically 
or artificially, but naturally and vitally, with a 
full revelation of all that a God may be, both im- 
manent and transcendent, and of all that the mys- 


The Christ in Primitive Religion 31 


tery of Nature may symbolize to us, and all that 
we may learn from the darker mystery of Death. 

Naturism—to devote a few words to this aspect 
of our subject—must be a permanent element of 
true religion to save us from the errors of the 
Manichaean and from those other forms of dual- 
ism which separate God from His created work. 
He who links God with Nature, however crudely, 
is already on his way to an appreciation of the 
central doctrine of the Christian faith, namely, 
the Incarnation. No Christian need sigh to be “a 
pagan suckled in a creed outworn” in order that 
he may obtain those glimpses of God in Nature to 
make him “less forlorn.” The Creation is divine “ 
self-limitation no less than the Cross, yet, no less 
than the Cross, it is the revelation of supremest 
Love. 

Historically (though not always with the same 
sequence) Naturism develops in general along 
the following lines: 

First, in respect to its Theology, we have that 
sense of the numinous which recognizes and re- 
sponds to something alive and spiritual in the 
world outside oneself and in every part of that 
world. We may, if we will, speak of this as ani- 
mism, so long as we use the term in no restricted 
technical sense but as denoting that doctrine of 
“yniversal vitality” spoken of by Tylor. A step 
forward or backward, as the case may be, is to be 
found in what is known as fetichism, whereby the 
possession of some object possessed itself of di- 


32 The Universal Faith 


vinity, it may be the stone against which one has 
lately stubbed one’s toe, may be regarded as giv- 
ing one a special control over divine forces cap- 
able of helping or of hurting. This leads to certain 
forms of localizing deity, and presently to the 
reverence of certain trees, or springs, or stones, 
as the residence of God. Among men of higher at- 
tainment intellectually and spiritually, the sense 
of wonder in the presence of natural phenomena 
will lead to personification and so on again to 
personalization. Then, under the stimulating in- 
fluence of a poetic imagination, or out of the social 
changes involved by the federation of a number 
of city states, a polytheism will be created, with 
its multiplicity and its hierarchy of gods. Some 
will be representative of different objects in na- 
ture, such as sun and wind and rain. Some will 
represent abstractions, even such prosaic ones as 
the indigitamenta of the old Roman religion. Some 
will be sun-gods or storm-gods called by different 
names because originating in different communi- 
ties. Some of them will retire with changing cir- 
cumstances back into “the Quiet,” through loss 
of popular interest or through supposed change 
of celestial dynasty. Some will sink into a court 
of subordinate deities, or angels. Some again will 
change their character, storm-gods becoming war- 
gods, and so on. 

Then philosophy may step in, resolving all such 
polytheisms, on the one hand, into what we call 
Pantheism, in which all idea of transcendency is 


The Christ in Primitive Religion 33 


lost and all the manifestations of Nature viewed 
as the self-revelation of an eternal Absolute iden- 
tical with Nature. Or, on the other hand, poly- 
theism may pass by way of national religion into 
the worship of one deity, the rest being ignored 
and forgotten. This stage, to which the name is 
given of Henotheism, or monolatry, may pass, as 
in the case of the Jew, into a true Monotheism. 

All these lines of development and all incidents 
of the development have their importance. As Dr. 
Israel Abrahams writes: “It is not enough that 
primitive ideas made way for advanced ideas.... 
Rise as we will, there is always a residue of the 
primitive left; the higher ideas would be different 
but for that residue; and not only different but 
worse. It is the primitive in the advanced which 
gives the advanced its flavor. It is the abiding, 
indelible, eternal survival of the past in the pres- 
ent which binds the generations in a true tradi- 
tion, that makes the present livingly adaptable 
to conditions of life.” 

Thus both Indian Pantheism and Hebrew Mono- 
theism have contributed to the Christian theology, 
the one as preserving for us the doctrine of the 
Divine Immanence, and the other as securing for 
us the doctrine of Divine Transcendence; the one 
helping to keep God near, and the other to pre- 
serve the mysterium tremendum which is required 
to keep religion supra-rational. 

All the accessories, moreover, of Natural The- 
ology, the splendor, the power, the purity of the 


34 The Universal Faith 


upper world, have been carried along with the un- 
folding revelation to supply elements in the con- 
ception of the Christian Heaven which are essen- 
tial parts of the symbolism of faith. Even in the 
Christian Creed, which declares “He ascended into 
Heaven,” we are obliged to use the language of 
mythology. By a necessity of language we employ 
the same metaphor which furnished alike the 
Greek with his picture of Olympus and the gods 
“who lie beside their nectar,” and S. Bernard with 
the immortal vision of 


“Urbs Sion unica, mansio mystica, condita, coelo.”’ 


To quote again the thought, if not the precise 
words, of Dr. Abrahams, it is primitive to think 
of God as close at hand; it is primitive again to 
place Him in a local heaven. Yet without these 
two primitive ideas we could not have our pres- 
ent sense of God’s presence in Nature and His 
power beyond. 

Nor is the cult which grew up gradually as the 
ritualization of these beliefs of less importance. 
Out of the primary awe arising from the felt pres- 
ence of God in Nature developed many of the prac- 
tices which still survive in some form or other as 
essential elements of the religious life of to-day. 
This is true in spite of the many outworn forms 
which are dropped by the way or are left to be 
the mere playthings of the unreflecting. 

First, perhaps, comes the recognition of Omens, 
that particular use of the revelation of Nature 


The Christ in Primitive Religion ob 


which arises when men, with simple, child-like 
minds, seek to understand the significance of her 
many voices. 

Next, comes the more deliberate and self-con- 
scious pursuit of that revelation in the many prac- 
tices which we sum up under the general name of 
Divination. Here man, instead of awaiting pas- 
sively the leading of Nature, follows to her most 
secret shrines to interrogate her wisdom. 

Next, not necessarily, of course, in time, we 
find the religious faculty attaining some degree 
of moralization, at least on the negative side, by 
coming under the beginnings of law in the form 
of Tabu. It is recognized that there is danger in 
the transgressing of Nature’s commandments, 
even though these commandments may be imposed 
and interpreted by the tyranny of priest or chief. 

On the positive side, comes that most fruitful 
adventure in religious experience which we de- 
scribe under the inadequate term of Imitative or 
Sympathetic Magic. It represents the belief on the 
part of primitive man that it is possible for him 
to codperate effectively with Nature, imitating 
her methods and securing her results, even, on 
occasion, stimulating the flagging forces of Na- 
ture in the daily miracle of the sunrise or the an- 
nual miracles of rainfall and harvest. 

When all these practices have been duly ritual- 
ized, it is seen that the foundations of many of 
our religious institutions have been permanently 
laid. It would be interesting to follow this out in 


36 The Universal Faith 


detail, but the exposition would require more 
space and time than is fitting in this brief survey. 

But, still further, beyond the effort to assist 
the processes of Nature and to secure her results, 
we find in primitive religion the belief that Na- 
ture may even be conquered and subdued to the 
advantage of a particular tribe or individual. 
There were powers, it was believed, in Nature 
which could be enslaved and compelled to work 
the will of man, if only the proper spell, or man- 
tra, were uttered, or the proper sacrifice laid upon 
the altar. 

In all these things there are, of course, ele- 
ments which have fitly enough been allowed to 
become obsolete, or to be classed among the things 
we call superstitions. But it has been the fashion 
to deal too irreverently with this stage of religion, 
as though representing nothing but a piece of bar- 
baric naturalism. It is necessary not only to re- 
member the degree of divine leading to be dis- 
cerned even thus early in the history of mankind, 
but also to remind ourselves of how much that is 
vital to religion has moved upward all the way, 
growing with our growth and expanding with 
every increase of light. The science of to-day, for 
instance, differs only from the knowledge which 
interpreted omens and consulted divinations in 
its completer generalizations and sounder deduc- 
tions. Imitative Magic suggested crudely to primi- 
tive man the tremendous part man plays to-day 
as a co-worker with Nature in the fulfilment of 


The Christ in Primitive Religion S/ 


the divine order. The use of mantras and sacri- 
fices to force God’s will on our behalf has grown 
into the Christian doctrine (often enough but 
slightly apprehended even to-day) as to prayer 
and communion with the divine. As already 
pointed out, even the very crudenesses of the early 
stages still have their place for “the enduring 
primitive” which is in us all. It is important to 
insist on all this, not only lest in our processional 
pride we should ignore the proper recessional 
humility, but mainly in order that we should con- 
ceive aright of the whole history of religion as 
one continuous, God-inspired, and God-directed ef- 
fort to transform the primeval Chaos into the per- 
fect brightness of the celestial day. 

Turning to the second object of cosmic emotion, 
we find, as was above suggested, awe in the pres- 
ence of the mystery of Death. This awe at the 
first may very well have consisted, in the main, of 
fear. Especially must this have been the case, oc- 
curring very frequently, where death due to the 
prevalence of epidemic disease seemed the work 
of a malignant and revengeful spirit. Yet, even 
in early times,—the fascinans manifesting itself 
together with the tremendum—such fear could not 
but be mingled with some measure of grief and 
affection. And out of it all was to grow not only a 
theory as to the lot of the dead in another state 
of existence, but also a closer sense of family unity 
and an enlarged conception of life as potentially 
triumphant over death. 


38 The Universal Faith 


The steps in the development of the Spiritistic 
creed are, to speak generally, as follows: 

First, there grew up a firm belief in the contin- 
ued personal existence of the dead. It matters not 
to-day how that belief originated or by what ar- 
guments it was sustained. There may very well 
have entered the witness of dreams; there may 
very well again have been present the feeling that 
the outbreak of contagious disease was the work 
of some displeased spirit of the dead. The impor- 
tant fact is that the belief, at its very crudest, 
contained a predisposition to, a divination of, the 
highest Christian faith as to the future, and thus 
was able illimitably to grow, rather than to dis- 
appear among the outgrown fancies of early man, 
a mere “tribal fantasy” of the anthropologist. In 
any case, too, it had value as making for the 
solidarity of the family, living and dead. It thus 
continued to give honorable place to those whose 
strength and wisdom had served the clan in life. 
These must still be recognized. So appeared the 
germ of something which was later to take shape 
as the Christian doctrine of “the Communion of 
Saints.” 

In many, perhaps in most, this sense of the con- 
tinuity of family life extending backwards out of 
sight, took form in what we call Totemism, 
whereby ancestry was honored in a certain ani- 
mal, or even in a certain plant. Need I point out 
here the significance of this theriomorphic ele- 
ment in religion, not alone in the primitive past? 


The Christ in Primitive Religion 39 


For all along the way, it served its purpose, as 
witness the beast-fables and the jatakas of the In- 
dian writers, or as witness the symbolisms of 
heraldry, individual and national, down to the last 
cartoon depicting the Gallic cock or the American 
eagle. Even in the highest form of religion the 
theriomorphic still maintains a certain position. 
The symbols of the Lamb of God, the Dove of the 
Spirit, the Four Living Ones of the Apocalypse, 
are all living and valid to-day, in spite of their 
derivation. And their usefulness, moreover, is by 
no means confined to the realm of symbolism, 
since they serve to push back the influence of the 
Cross beyond the desires of the sons of men to 
the groaning of all creation awaiting the redemp- 
tion of all things. The modern science of evolution 
is more religious than it sometimes deems itself, 
even as S. Francis was closer to the facts of mod- 
ern science than men imagine when he preached 
to the birds as his little brothers and sisters and 
held the wolf of Gubbio as within the reach of his 
evangel. 

From the belief in the continued existence of 
the dead arose the deification of the dead. It was 
inevitable that the “first ancestor” must be the 
lord of the realm to which he was the first to es- 
tablish claim. So the dead became the Elohim (the 
Powers), the pitri (fathers), the shén (spirits), 
the kami (the gods). Yama, or Yima, and his 
representatives in other lands, became kings 
among the dead, and so gods. 


40 The Universal Faith 


Moreover, the realm to which the dead des- 
cended, though but a hole in the ground conceded 
by the abandonment of the old cave dwelling place 
to the deceased, expands gradually into a king- 
dom. It is shadowy and gloomy, such a place as 
makes natural the immortal plaint of Achilles. 
But it is nevertheless a realm. There the dead lie, 
asleep or restlessly awake, in their several camps, 
“all of them slain, fallen by the sword” (Ezek. 
XXX1i) 

With belief in the realm of Hades grew up the 
belief in those accessories of the lower regions, 
such as the Bridge, originally, perhaps, the log 
across which the primitive man passed unsteadily 
to his rest beyond the river; the Dog, the pariah 
beast, dog, jackal, or pig, which, rooting among 
the graves, is eventually raised to function among 
the underworld gods—all forming part of a grim 
mythology which, step by step, rises into Christian 
allegory of which the truth must still be expressed 
mainly by symbol. 

In Spiritism, as in Naturism, creed becomes the 
basis for cult. Of the profound influence of Jotem- 
ism and Ancestor-worship upon social evolution 
there is no need to speak. The very lowest of man- 
kind, as in the case of the aborigines of Australia, 
have had their part in it. In the case of China, 
ancestor-worship has had a large part in the crea- 
tion and sustaining of a great ethical system 
which only awaits the spiritualizing touch of 


The Christ in Primitive Religion 4| 


Christ to become extraordinarily potent for the 
welfare of mankind. 

In fact, everything in the practices of Spiritism 
possesses a value by no means confined to the 
archaeological. The care of the dead, the disposal 
of the dead, the commemoration of the dead, even 
communications with the dead, have, in relation 
to past practices, their present values. There were 
in the actions of simple and child-like savages, 
expressions of feeling which were manifestations 
of divination as well as the gropings of reason, 
certain aspirations of a living faith which rise 
all the way out of darkness into the very presence 
of God. 

Of course, the danger to modern men is lest 
they yield to the temptation to stay with the first 
stages instead of accepting the new steps which 
are offered to their feet. That is why, in the case 
of Spiritism especially, certain beliefs and prac- 
tices have become exceedingly mischievous. That 
is why, even for the Hebrew, the older forms of 
necromancy were forbidden by religious authority, 
when a new stage of religious experience opened 
up. The old belief in personal continuance of life 
beyond the grave, valid as it was, remained too 
tenuous, too shadowy and gloomy, when limited 
and tied up to the old theology. Life needed to be 
enriched in quality by a new conception of God as 
well as by an enlarged conception of life before 
it would be possible to lift to higher levels the 


42 The Universal Faith 


doctrine of personal immortality. Thus “the road 
to Endor,” of which Kipling warns the world, is 
a way backward rather than forward. The steps 
trodden by early men on their way towards the 
light were valid for themselves, but not for others, 
even though we confess ourselves as brothers in 
a common pilgrimage along the highway to di- 
viner life. 

Now to sum up the main points to which [ 
have limited myself in this chapter: 

Don’t let us despise the anthropomorphic in re- 
ligion. It was necessary in the early stage; its 
necessity has by no means disappeared, since we 
have no knowledge of aught but ourselves out of 
which knowledge to find terms to express our un- 
derstanding of God. The word “Father,” anthro- 
pomorphic as it is, is still to-day more practically 
stimulating in the religious sense than the most 
philosophic definition of the Deity ever coined. 
The great thing to remember is that the terms we 
thus employ are not definitions at all, but sym- 
bols; symbols, moreover, effective to the limit only 
of their own symbolism. For example, my finger, 
pointed to the sun when I exclaim “The sun is 
over there,” is a true symbol only so far as, in- 
stead of fixing the eye of the beholder on the end 
of the finger, it suggests to that eye the following 
of a line projected infinitely from that finger end 
to the object designated. 

The anthropomorphic has greater warrant still, 
for God does indeed touch man through Nature, 


The Christ in Primitive Religion 43 


even as man rises to communion with God through 
his immortal spirit. 

Even the theriomorphic, as already hinted, is 
not put completely out of court. Christianity bids 
us realize the share all Nature has in the method 
by which the world is lifted up from weakness to 
power through sacrifice. In this the brute crea- 
tion has, of course, its portion. The swine that 
ran violently down a steep place to perish in the 
waters, were nearer Calvary than the worldly 
drovers who complained of the loss of wealth in- 
curred by the presence of Jesus in their midst. 
The “shabby old scapegoat” was nearer to the 
program of Messiahship which Jesus illustrated 
on Quarantania than were the ideas of priest and 
people. The ass on which the Saviour rode into 
Jerusalem, she too had a share in the Passion, and 
in its results. So perhaps the conception of Heaven 
which Rupert Brooke quaintly attributes to the 
fishes may represent—for them—something as 
real as the symbols, just as inadequate, we em- 
ploy for our own edification: 


“Somewhere beyond Space and Time, 

Is wetter water, slimier slime! 

And there (they trust) there swimmeth One 
Who swam ere rivers were begun; 

Immense, of fishy form and mind, 
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind; 

And under that Almighty Fin, 

The littlest fish may enter in. 

Oh, never fly conceals a hook, 

Fish say, in that Eternal Brook, 


44 The Universal Faith 


But more than mundane weeds are there, 
And mud celestially fair; 

Fat caterpillars drift around, 

And Paradisal grubs are found; 

Unfading moths, immortal flies, 

And the worm that never dies. 

And in that Heaven of all they wish, 
There shall be no more land, say fish.” 


Beyond these generalizations emerge three 
broad hints as to what religion is to be, when the 
primitive has become the universal: 

1. As to God. God is transcendent, the “wholly 
other,” the Maker, anterior to and superior to 
His work. God is also the Work, the Visible, the 
Idea fulfilled in Creation, and most consummately 
in that crowning point of Creation which reflects 
most perfectly the Divine Idea, the Human. God 
is, once again, the Immanent Spirit abiding in the 
work, the Spirit by which creation is informed 
and inspired. Thus from the first we have the 
Trinity in germ, no mere dogma of ecclesiastics 
and schoolmen, but something from the first neces- 
sary to distinguish God from the impersonal “sim- 
ple force” to which some would reduce Him. 

2. As to Man and his Destiny. We find that des- 
tiny from the first largely and prophetically con- 
ceived. The material is at no point a sufficient ex- 
planation of the mystery of humanity. There is a 
mysterium tremendum about Man as well as about 
God. Man’s spirit rises superior to the limits of 
time and matter. The future world is indeed as 
yet but slightly moralized, but, as in life, so in 


The Christ in Primitive Religion 45 


death, to be a member of the clan is to be within, 
to be an outcast or an alien is to have one’s por- 
tion “without the camp.” 

3. As to Society. Here too there is the presenti- 
ment of something vast, catholic, undefined, mys- 
terious. The very mystery of worship in the ear- 
liest times, like the mystery which still clings to 
the ritual and language of the Mass, or the mys- 
tery of the far distances in some Gothic Cathedral, 
suggests these large conceptions of what commu- 
nion is in store for the souls of men. Primitive 
society might be only the clan or the tribe, but, 
both here and hereafter, there was suggested a 
solidarity which only sin (whatever the concep- 
tion of sin might be) might break. To be a mem- 
ber of a human family necessitated the recogni- 
tion of obligations which left no man free in the 
selfish sense. The higher the position of leader- 
ship accorded to the individual, the more insis- 
tent became the ties. The rule was evermore, ‘He 
who did most shall bear most.” And to be 
“sathered to the fathers” (even though within the 
narrow limits of a desert grave) embodied some- 
thing of the larger hope. The social morality which 
held within itself the power of inclusion or of 
exclusion possessed in an ever unfolding way the 
promise of judgment to come, of heaven and of 
hell. 

Bloody too as were all the rites which primitive 
man accepted as the conditions of his existence, 
the blood shed, we doubt not, was not infrequently 


46 The Universal Faith 


part of the sacrificial life-stream which flowed 
beneath the altar of the living God. Here too was 
life as yet unvindicated, awaiting the perfect 
revelation of the Divine Love, and in the mean- 
time crying, like the saints of Judaism, for the 
answer which came at last from the Cross: 

“How long, O Master, the holy and true, 


Dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood, 
On them that dwell on the earth?’ 


CHAPTER III 


THE CHRIST IN JUDAISM 


“What advantage then hath the Jew? Much every 
way.’—S. Paul. 


“Tsrael: To gather me my chieftains Thou didst promise, 
The day comes not and miracle is none, 
Nor see I temple built nor any herald 
Of Peace arrive to be My Holy One— 
Ah, wherefore lingers Jesse’s promised son? 


God: Behold, I keep the oath I swore to gather 
My captives—kings shall bring their gifts to thee. 
Created for a witness to the nations, 
My holy ones shall testify to Me. 
Yea, Jesse’s son Mine eyes already see. 
—Ibn Gebdirol. 


SYNOPSIS 


In what is Jewish religion unique?—its association 
with the lineage of the Christ—the ancestry of Christ— 
its foreign element—the geographical and historical con- 
tacts of Judaism— Judaism as receiver, carrier, distrib- 
utor of world ideas—her conservative (centripetal) 
force—her centrifugal foree—the two capitals of Judaism 
—Jerusalem and Alexandria. 

The liaison of Jewish religion with primitive religions 
—lIsrael and primitive Semitism—‘“the Amorite was thy 
father and thy mother was an Hittite’—the special 
qualities of Hebrew religion—its attitude and its earnest- 


47 





48 The Universal Faith 


ness—the limitations of early Hebrew religion—in con- 
ception of God—in limited views of Society—in ideas of 
human destiny. 

The religious revolution under Moses—the covenant 
with Yahweh—enlarged conception of God—and of so- 
ciety—national religion—the nomad—the agriculturist— 
the beginnings and growth of prophetism—the work of 
the prophets—the gains, theological and moral, they 
brought—the collapse of nationalism—Judaism mono- 
theistic—and her religion international—the struggle be- 
tween the centripetal and the centrifugal—the Holiness 
to be preserved—and to be proclaimed—Judaism in touch 
with the Greek—the message of the sage—the martyrdom 
of Judaism—and its effect upon views of human destiny 
—the doctrine of a future life. 

The gains of Jewish religion for the worid’s use—a 
universal God—a world-wide society—the religion of the 
individual—life beyond the grave—Apocalyptic dreams 
of the Theophany and Theodicy—the method of the 
Cross—‘His Blood be on us and on our children”—-Emma 
Lazarus on The Passion of Israel. 


T is frequently asserted—indeed it has been al- 

ready assumed as a fact in these pages—that 
the record of the revelation given to the Jew in 
the Old Testament Scriptures forms but one Old 
Testament among many designed to prepare the 
minds of men for the dawn of the new day of the 
spirit. This is, of course, a point of view invalu- 
able to the modern missionary who in delivering 
his message is careful to find the precise point of 
departure in the minds of his hearers. But, never- 
theless, the assertion needs some qualification, 
Since it would be impossible, even if the Jewish 
Scriptures did not exist, to overlook the special 


The Christ in Judaism 49 


role which the Jew has been called upon to play in 
establishing a liaison between the old and the 
new. 

The reasons for assigning this distinction to 
Judaism (using the term for the present of the 
religion of Israel in all its stages) may be assem- 
bled as follows: 

1. First, because the human lineage of Christ 
is traced, in the main, from the seed of Abraham. 
Let us note the significance of the qualification 
“in the main,” since S. Matthew, the most Jewish 
of the four Evangelists, has taken pains to reveal 
to us the intrusion of the foreign element in the 
case of the three named ancestresses of Christ, 
namely, Rahab, the Canaanitess, Ruth, the Moab- 
itess, and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hit- 
tite. It is not a little suggestive as proclaiming 
the extent to which the Christ lays hold upon all 
our humanity, with its sins and failures, that of 
the only four women mentioned prior to the Vir- 
gin Mother in Our Lord’s genealogy, three are 
aliens by blood and three are women with a blot 
upon their character. It is additional evidence of- 
fered, by one mainly concerned to show that Jesus 
is the Son of David, that He is also, in the fullest 
sense, “Son of Man.” 

2. Secondly, because the geographical and his- 
torical contacts of the people of Israel made them 
the inevitable receivers, carriers, and distributors 
of ideas from and between the great world powers 
of the pre-Christian epoch. Like a full stream fed 


50 The Universal Faith 


by many tributaries, Judaism bore the waters col- 
lected from these many sources towards the ocean 
of their fulfilment. “The giant forms of empire” 
with which Israel was brought into tragic con- 
flict were “on their way to ruin.” Yet they yielded 
up, ere they fell, those gifts of the spirit with 
which they had been dowered to the Judaism they 
despised and upon which they trampled. All these 
several contributions, which some have feared to 
acknowledge lest they should seem thereby to be 
doing violence to the unique claims of Christian- 
ity, from the creation myths of Babylon to the 
angelology of Persia, or to the philosophies of 
Greece, must, on the contrary, be regarded as es- 
sential to the completeness of the Hebrew wit- 
ness. The Jew was a guest, or a captive, in every 
land, just in order that he might be the link be- 
tween what God had already revealed and the 
new things which were yet to appear. 

o. Thirdly, because what Judaism was able to 
receive from the Gentile world—what by reason 
of her geographical position in the corridor be- 
tween the continents she was enabled to gather— 
she was also by the same fact to distribute. As 
we shall see a little later, she possessed a centri- 
petal force which enabled her to concentrate and 
retain; she possessed also a centrifugal force 
which impelled her to distribute. In her one capi- 
tal, Jerusalem, loyalty to what had been com- 
mitted to her became a passion, and well nigh a 
fanaticism. In her other capital, Alexandria, she 


The Christ in Judaism 51 


developed a sense of mission and became, almost 
in spite of herself, the Apostle to the Gentiles. 

Yet, while stressing this important point as to 
the uniqueness of Judaism in preparation for the 
Universal Religion, we must be careful to remem- 
ber that the religion of Israel was a kind of liaison 
officer with a duty at either end of its remarkable 
history. At the point where the developed product 
of the faith of Abraham, as an accumulated fund 
of both faith and experience, is poured into the 
life of the New Dispensation, there are links 
which have not failed to obtain general recogni- 
tion. The nationality of the first apostles, the use 
of the Hebrew scriptures, the emphasis placed 
upon the fulfilment of the Jewish sacrifices, the 
dramatic passing of the Temple system,—all this 
has made the fact inescapable. In Novo Testa- 
mento patet quod in Veteri Testamento latet. 

But the liaison is just as significant at the re- 
moter point, where the religion of Israel first be- 
gins to differentiate itself from the religions of 
the surrounding Semitic tribes. We have at this 
point a contact, providentially ordered, which, al- 
though it has been less observed, is equally sug- 
gestive. 

Let us try to connect this chapter with the last 
by noting some of the salient features of this par- 
ticular relation. It will enable us to see in what 
way the truths dwelt upon as glimpsed in primi- 
tive religion were acted upon, as by a subtle kind 
of alchemy, in the laboratory of Jewish experi- 


3 The Universal Faith 


ence, to be turned over to the uses of Christianity. 

It is a distinct gain to the service of religion 
that the supposed separateness of early Israel in 
race, language, and religion is no longer main- 
tained. The older idea was partly due to the chau- 
vinistic pride of the Jew, partly to our own tradi- 
tional misconception of what was meant by the 
term “the chosen people.” Now that archaeology, 
philology, and comparative religion have all alike 
thrown light upon the subject, we see how little, 
in the Bible itself, the traditional theory had in 
its favor. It is much more significant to recognize 
with Israel that the Hebrew language was “a 
tongue of Canaan,” an ordinary Semitic dialect, 
than to think of it as the sacred primal language, 
spoken by our first parents as they walked among 
the glades of Eden. It is much more significant to 
appreciate the somewhat brutal force of Ezekiel, 
when he bade the Jews remember: “Thy birth and 
thy nativity is of the land of the Canaanite; the 
Amorite was thy father, and thy mother was an 
Hittite” (Ez. xvi 3), than to think of the Jew as 
unrelated to the world in which he moved. So in 
religion, we must bear in mind that the quality 
of Hebrew faith and its value for the fulfilment 
of the divine plan was in no wise conditioned by 
the advanced character of its theology or by the 
superiority of its morality. 

If we ask what were the reasons for the special 
place which Judaism was destined to occupy as 
a force in religious history, even as Greece be- 


The Christ in Judaism 53 


came a force in the development of art, or Rome 
in the region of law, we shall find these reasons 
in two facts. The first is in that consistently 
spiritual attitude which, in spite of the defection 
of the many, kept the soul of the nation ever look- 
ing towards God. The story of Jacob is the his- 
torical illustration of how the Jew, carnal and 
material as his natural appetites might be, tricks- 
ter and mean as he might be by inclination, strug- 
gles on, until by wrestling, as it were with God 
Himself, he wins his new nature and the new 
name which is its sign and reward. The second is 
that intensity of moral earnestness, amounting 
sometimes almost to ferocity and fanaticism, 
which insisted upon the moralization of life’s ex- 
perience. 

Of course, it is obvious that not all Israel was 
of Israel. The Israel related to the “old clo’ man” 
was often triumphant over the Israel related to 
the Evangelical Prophet. As a living Jewish poet, 
Israel Zangwill, says: 


“Hear, O Israel, Jehovah, the Lord, our God, is One, 
But we, Jehovah, His people, are dual and so undone.” 


Yet, after all, it was the faith of the nation which 
determined its religious experience, and though 
“the remnant” dwindled and dwindled till the 
“Servant of Yahweh” became an Ideal Person, yet 
of that Ideal it was still true: 

‘“‘Wheresoe’er a Jew dwelt there dwelt Truth, 


And wheresoe’er a Jew was there was Light, 
And wheresoe’er a Jew went there went Love.” 


54 The Universal Faith 


Having recalled to ourselves then the fact that 
the Jew was called to be God’s apostle, just as the 
first Christian apostles were called by the Lake 
of Galilee, not for what they knew, or were, or 
could do, but because of what they were capable 
of becoming, and knowing, and achieving, let us 
now see what that selfsame Jew did with the 
primitive conceptions of religion he received from 
his environment. 

We see him at first a sharer in the limitations 
of his neighbors. He has the same inadequate con- 
ception of God, Who is to him what He was to the 
heathen, a vaguely personal aggregation of 
“powers” which they called Hlohim. He has the 
same limited conception of ethics. It is still cred- 
ible that God may demand the actual slaying of 
a son in sacrifice, and there is little in the way of 
injury which it is unlawful to inflict upon the 
alien. He has, again, the same limited conception 
of society, which is, for all the purposes of social 
morality, as hinted above, confined to the family 
or clan. “The stranger within thy gate” is only 
accepted when he comes, separated from his own 
tribe, to throw himself upon the hospitality of 
the camp. He has, lastly, the same faint percep- 
tion of the future life, since the “gathering to the 
fathers” is, as in the case of the pagan Semites, 
the union of the spirit with the spirits of the dead 
in some dim, shadowy simulacrum of the camp 
beneath the soil. 

From such a beginning, which touches at all 


The Christ in Judaism 55 


points the religious condition of most primitive 
peoples, let us enumerate roughly the steps along 
the upward way. 

If we think of the spiritual attitude and the 
moral earnestness of the potential “Servant,” the 
qualities which at the outset give direction and 
force to the chosen instrument, as illustrated in 
the person of Abraham, we may take it that the 
first great revolutionary change which registers 
progress is to be associated with the leadership of 
the great law-giver Moses. 

In this instance, as commonly in the history of 
religion, personality plays its important part. The 
story bears in its every incident the evidence of 
how the leader carried the laggard people through 
the wilderness like the true shepherd who feels 
himself charged with the dead weight of a gen- 
erally reluctant flock. But there were, neverthe- 
less, other elements in the situation making for 
religious advance. 

The bondage in Egypt, with some intellectual 
gains, had created a revulsion against the ideals of 
the old Egyptian religion, even as the experience 
of Abraham, with whatever gains it likewise had 
been associated, had provoked revulsion against 
the civilization of Babylon. Further, the loftier 
monolatry of Midian, with its more personally 
conceived god of storm and war, Yahweh, had in- 
troduced a new element into the religion of Israel, 
or had re-emphasized one which had been pre- 
viously local and limited. 


56 The Universal Faith 


The recognition of an adoption by the moun- 
tain God of Sinai, defective as the conception may 
appear to modern theology, marked an immense 
advance beyond the worship of the Elohim. There 
was something more personal, more anthropo- 
morphic, something at once tenderer and more 
passionately concerned, than anything they had 
had before. To be taken up by Yahweh, led and 
sustained, championed and fought for, even pun- 
ished and afflicted, brought about a new idea of 
the relation between God and mankind. To go 
back to Canaan behind the standard of such a 
deity was the very urge they needed to rise to a 
sterner view of the moral values, and so launch 
a holy war against the idolatrous naturalism of 
those whose rites, as agriculturists, seemed abomi- 
nable in the eyes of the desert dwellers. In brief, 
the word “holiness” was in process of taking on 
new and more transcendent meaning. 

For a while, under the conditions of the new 
life, it was a struggle to the death, the nomad 
against the settled folk, Yahweh against the 
Baalim and Ashtaroth, moral ideals against the 
licentious rites which, on the lines of imitative 
magic, were supposed to stimulate the reproduc- 
tive powers of the soil. 

In this struggle, the general tendency of the mas- 
ses and their rulers was to assimilate themselves 
in belief and practice to the older habits of the 
land. But the vital force of religion, what one 
might call “the law of vital procedure,” that 


The Christ in Judaism 57 


“tendency towards perfection” by which life ever 
shapes itself towards better things, shows itself 
in the rise of the prophetic order. Few more strik- 
ing illustrations of evolution in a religious organ- 
ism are to be found than the way in which the 
shaman, or medicine man, is enabled to lend him- 
self to the divine uses, until he becomes the spokes- 
man for God of the highest religious truths. Be- 
ginning as the mere clairvoyant minister to the 
secular necessities of a village community, un- 
couthly clad, eccentric in conduct, emotionally 
controlled and affected by music, used as a finder 
of lost cattle and the like, we see the prophet in 
Israel gradually transformed, through right 
spiritual attitude and intensity of moral earnest- 
ness, into the prophet as we see him in the pages 
of Isaiah or Jeremiah. 

Thenceforth there is no great crisis in Hebrew 
history which is without its prophetic interpre- 
tation, an interpretation, moreover, which has 
significance for all ages and for all the world. 

From the struggle between the entrenched 
forces of the older naturalism and the new Yahw- 
ism we come to the interpretation of the Assyrian 
menace of the 8th century B. C., which the proph- 
ets were the first to perceive and the first to un- 
derstand. Amos, the wool-grower of Tekoa, 
brought into contact with world politics in the 
cities to which he takes his wool, and brooding 
over those politics in his pastures and among his 
fig-trees, becomes convinced of an _ over-ruling 


58 The Universal Faith 


Power to whom all the nations are subject, about 
to break in upon the fancied security of Israel 
with judgment. Hosea, the poet-prophet of Galilee, 
out of his own experience of love and grief, and 
out of a love which survives in spite of grief, adds 
to the announcement of judgment the doctrine of 
the Divine Love which uses judgment as part of 
the educative discipline which shall purify and 
redeem. Isaiah and Micah bear their witness in 
the southern kingdom, shaken as that kingdom is 
by the downfall of the northern capital. Isaiah’s 
emphasis is upon the assurance of the Divine 
Presence which makes Jerusalem safe, even 
though surrounded by the confident truculence 
of the hitherto victorious adversary. Micah is 
chiefly concerned, in the light of that some pas- 
sage of the Assyrian through the land, with the 
need of social penitence and revival of faith. 

Then Zephaniah scents from afar the terror of 
the Seythian, and proclaims the advent of that 
Day of Yahweh which colored for all time to come 
the visions of apocalypse. Nahum raises his voice 
in the taunt songs which at once hail and antici- 
pate the downfall of the “bloody city” of Nineveh 
which has so long tyrannized over the surrounding 
states. 

Then—a new step for prophecy—Habakkuk, 
“the first sceptic”’ in Israel, goes to his lonely 
watch-tower to fight out the battle of faith, though 
truth apparently were slain in the midst of the 
street. Suppose, he asks, Isaiah’s optimism to be 


The Christ in Judaism 59 


ill-founded, and the assault of the Chaldaean to 
succeed where the Assyrian had failed, what is 
to be the relation between the soul and God? So 
the prophet wrings out of hostile circumstances 
the sublime affirmation which strengthened re- 
ligion for all time, that the life of the just man 
is still bound up with fidelity to Yahweh. 

After this we have the two great prophets of 
the captivity epoch whose doom it was to look 
upon and explain to a depressed age the antici- 
pated calamity. Jeremiah, in the unpopular réle 
of one who knows the captivity to be inevitable, 
must vindicate faith in the national God through 
a time of national disaster and be himself an il- 
lustration of that faith and of the power of suf- 
fering to be serviceable. Hzekiel, among the cap- 
tives by the canal Chebar, must, far off from the 
fatal scene, endure, for himself and others, the 
shock and reverberation of Jerusalem’s fall; then 
he must brace himself to the vision and task of re- 
construction. 

Then, a happier lot, with the capture of Baby- 
lon by the Achaemenian, we have with us the 
Evangelical Prophet, singing in inspired strain 
the return of the remnant, making monothe- 
ism secure for the ages to come, and proclaim- 
ing, as no other voice has ever done, the hearten- 
ing mission to which the Servant people had been 
called in the providence of God. 

Sordid years elapse, years of disillusion and ap- 
parent failure. Is any revival of nationalism pos- 


60 The Universal Faith 


sible, or is Israel’s mission something grander 
than a nation may achieve? So the old man Haggai 
appears to proclaim the future glories of Judaism 
in her ministry to the world, and the young man 
Zechariah explains his visions to reassure men as 
to the validity of the worship and witness of re- 
ligion. 

The double mission of Judaism begins to be 
made clear: first, the mission to condense, con- 
centrate, hold, and defend to the death; secondly, 
the mission to distribute and transmit, this too 
even to the death of most that the Jew held dear. 

The centripetal aspect of the mission of Juda- 
ism has given us the Law, the Temple, the Priest- 
hood, the Sacrificial system. It has given us that 
wonderful pentagonal idea of Holiness, as repre- 
sented in the ceremonies of the Day of Atonement, 
in which the holiness of all Mankind is repre- 
sented by the High Priest, the holiness of all 
Time by the symbolism of the Day itself, the holi- 
ness of all Space by the symbolism of the Holy of 
Holies, the holiness of all Matter by the symbolism 
of the Sacrificial Blood, and the holiness of all 
Acts by the Sprinkling of the Blood upon the 
Mercy Seat. It was as though the whole religious 
system of the Jew were an intensification by spe- 
cialized emphasis in the five regions of Person, 
Time, Space, Matter, and Act, which might enable 
the conception to flow back upon the world with 
redeeming result. Thus all men should become 
priests, every day a day in which God and Man 


The Christ in Judaism 61 


would be at one, all space filled with the glory of 
God, even the bells upon the horses become holy to 
Yahweh, and every act be reckoned as high service 
at the altar of God. 

The centrifugal aspect of the mission of Juda- 
ism thus takes on meaning from the significance 
of the centripetal. As there was a mission to con- 
serve and protect, so there was a mission to dis- 
perse. The nationality so passionately, even 
fiercely, emphasized in a book like Hsther, the 
Jew must be prepared to cast into the crucible, 
in order that he may celebrate, as in books like 
Ruth and Jonah, the place of the Gentile in the 
good purposes of God. 

Hence a new era in the history of Judaism opens 
up to show the chosen people no longer the little, 
pent-up, struggling nationality, striving to main- 
tain a precarious foothold on the narrow isthmus 
between Asia and Africa, but now at last a world- 
wide influence spreading out from Alexandria, 
receiving and giving the treasures which God had 
appointed for her to receive and give. Of what she 
received during this critically significant epoch 
we must think in another chapter. What she was 
inspired to contribute must be summed up in a 
few sentences. As the prophet had been inspired 
to touch the moral conscience of mankind, and 
as the priest had been led to organize ritually the 
symbolism of religion, so now the Sage was em- 
ployed to be God’s instrument for making and 
keeping touch with the wisdom of the nations and 


62 The Universal Faith 


for speaking to the nations in a tongue easy to 
be understood. So too came the new language of 
Israel to the world in the Greek into which the 
sacred scriptures were translated. Such facts are, 
of course, among the evidences of the coming of 
that “fulness of time” when it would be the part 
of the Jew, at the sacrifice of himself, to quench 
the torch of his own national life, in order to pass 
on a brighter light to the Gentile world. 

But, ere we arrive at this point, it is necessary 
to note that the two more or less contemporaneous 
aspects of Jewish religion, the one with its centre 
at Jerusalem, the other at Alexandria, contra- 
dictory as they sometimes seem in their literature 
and in their attitude to life, were yet working to- 
gether towards the giving to the world another 
gift of tremendous importance for the cause of 
world religion. 

This is a new sense of the largeness of life. Both 
the sage at Alexandria and the martyr at Jerusa- 
lem under the stress of the persecution of An- 
tiochus Epiphanes, had come to recognize the 
falsity of the old philosophy which made all di- 
vine favor, to nation or to individual, measur- 
able by the degree of material prosperity enjoyed. 
It was now necessary to transcend the old philos- 
ophy of the Deuteronomic Code, as it applied to 
the nation, and to transcend no less the doctrine 
of Ezekiel, as applying to the individual, that jus- 
tice was invariably meted out by a “Judge of all 
the earth” Who “doeth right” within the space of 


The Christ in Judaism 63 


three score and ten mortal years. The problem is 
faced by some of the Psalmists and particularly 
in the Book of Job, and, while no certain convic- 
tion was possible to the Old Testament mind, 
light was glimpsed in two directions. On the one 
hand, Job’s demand for a God akin to himself in 
sympathy and in a common sense of right and 
wrong, became the link which made all the earlier 
anthropomorphic elements of religion predictive 
of fulfilment in the fact of the Incarnation. And, 
on the other hand, the thought of the Divine kin- 
ship made thinkable the sharing of the Divine life 
beyond the grave, and gathered up all the old in- 
tuitions of primitive men, as preserved in various 
forms of spiritism and necromancy,—intuitions 
which had been long suppressed by Yahwism as, 
by themselves, without moral fruit—into one 
great conviction as to a quality of life which it 
would be joy to possess evermore. 

Under the stimulus of hopes such as these it 
was possible for the Jew, out of the very furnace 
of his affliction, to see, through the fervid eyes of 
the apocalyptist, the triumph of that kingdom of 
God which was at once Theophany and Theodicy, 
the world wide rule of righteousness and the reign 
of the righteous God in partnership and kinship 
with mankind. 

In such a development as we have thus briefly 
sketched, what are the special elements of re- 
ligious truth which Judaism has gathered out of 
the chaotic beliefs and practices of primitive man 


64 The Universal Faith 


to lay at the feet of a world waiting for the full 
revelation of God? | 

We must summarize them briefly as follows: 

1. There is clear advance made towards an ade- 
quate conception of God. We see the tribal idea 
of God, not far removed from animism, displaced 
by the more anthropomorphically conceived Yah- 
weh, war-god and champion of tribes now welded 
into nationality. Satisfaction with a national di- 
vinity eventually gives way to the larger vision 
of a God Who belongs alike to the Ethiopian and 
to Israel, a God Who has been concerned with the 
exodus of the Philistines from Caphtor as well as 
with that of the Israelites from Egypt. From 
Amos onward, the feeling grows, until the heno- 
theism of the national stage is superseded by the 
genuine monotheism of the second Isaiah, the 
proclamation of a God Whose dominion is uni- 
versal and absolute, and beside Whom is no other. 

2. There is a corresponding development of the 
conception of the Church or of Society. In the be- 
ginning the elect element was the tribe alone, and 
outside was a humanity always alien and gen- 
erally hostile. The necessities of defence against 
the tribes of Canaan, and of loyalty to Yahweh 
Who had adopted them as His people, enabled 
Israel to create the monarchy, centralized at Jer- 
usalem, and to maintain its integrity until its 
peculiar task had been accomplished. The patriot- 
ism which was thus engendered has furnished 
the world with a still living symbolism, and “Jer- 


The Christ in Judaism 65 


usalem” remains still to the spirit something be- 
yond the power of speech or imagination to ex- 
press adequately. 

But the Jew learned, even before the tragedy 
came which dissolved the nation—with Edith 
Cavell—that there is something greater than pat- 
riotism. When the triple bond of God, Land, and 
People was so rudely severed, just as the idea of 
God, instead of perishing, rose to nobler propor- 
tions, so the ideas of Land and People, with the 
aid of an inspired symbolism, became ever vaster 
and more wonderful. What a communion became 
possible to those who had eyes to see all the na- 
tions of the earth bowed before a common God 
and engaged in a common service! What a Zion 
rose before the vision of men as they thought of 
the Gentile taking hold of the skirts of the Jew, 
demanding participation in the privileges of a 
common faith! Gradually all those elements of 
humanity which had been as it were eliminated 
while the specialization of the function of Israel 
was in process, are seen to be coming back in order 
that they may enjoy the fruits of that specializa- 
tion. The “chosen” people is indeed chosen, not 
for the enjoyment of selfish splendor, but in order 
that it may become “a light to lighten the Gen- 
tiles.” 

3. In the third place, continuously with the ex- 
pansion of the idea of the national into the human, 
we see the development of the sense of the individ- 
ual. The failure of the old philosophy of material 





66 The Universal Faith 


reward for religious fidelity, to which we alluded 
above, led necessarily to discrimination within 
the nation between those who kept and those who 
violated the law of God. Surely justice must dic- 
tate the recognition of some other principle be- 
side that of the solidarity of the family or tribe. 
It could not be fair that forever the fathers would 
eat sour grapes and that the children’s teeth 
should be set on edge. Solemn as was the certainty 
that evil consequences did follow the evil doer 
even to the third and fourth generation, there 
must be another side. This other side, first an- 
nounced by Jeremiah, is formulated by Ezekiel in 
the famous words: “The soul that sinneth, it shall 
die.” With the enunciation of this great truth, 
there opened upon the world possibilities of per- 
sonal religion and personal freedom of which 
earlier generations had not dreamed. As there was 
a world outside the nation which was under the 
direction of the Spirit of God, so also within the 
nation was, as it were, a microcosm, in which, 
equally as in Jerusalem, God could set up His 
Throne. By and by it would come to pass that a 
truer nationalism would find a place for a true 
individualism, even as nationalism itself would 
have found for it an abiding place in the true in- 
ternationalism of the Kingdom, when “the glory 
of the nations” should enter within the open gates 
of the City of God. 

4. Fourthly, Judaism brought to birth, in the 
train of the prophetic teaching as to the signifi- 


The Christ in Judaism 67 


cance of individualism, a larger conception of 
life itself. As we have seen, the teaching of Ezekiel 
that God rewarded or punished the actions of in- 
dividual men, for a while sufficed. In many of the 
circumstances of the normal life it did actually 
appear that it paid to be pious. “I have been 
young, and now am old,” said the Psalmist, “yet 
never saw I the righteous forsaken or his seed 
begging their bread.” Yet circumstances soon re- 
vealed themselves as frequently in contradiction 
to so optimistic a creed. Another Psalmist, frankly 
perplexed by the prosperity of the wicked, de- 
clares: “They are not in trouble as other men; 
neither are they plagued like other men.” The 
great poem of Job, as we have pointed out, took 
up the subject with great boldness, even with an 
audacity which seemed to some akin to blasphemy, 
carrying opposition to the traditional orthodoxy 
up to argument with God Himself. The solution, 
only faintly glimpsed in the poem, in course of 
time began to grow clearer. If life is to be justly 
judged, the judgment must take cognisance of a 
larger conception of life than one confined to the 
thought of life in this present body. So the old 
views as to the survival of the soul, which had 
been suppressed in the interest of practical moral- 
ity, now return charged with a new significance. 
“The glory of going on and still to be” becomes 
credible if man is to have some share in the life 
of the Eternal. In such a case, a theodicy may be 
hoped for such as shall not outrage the sense of 


68 The Universal Faith 


justice in the martyr who lays down his life for 
the sake of the truth. | 


“Only grant my soul may carry high through life her 
cup unspilled, 

Brimming though it be with knowledge, life’s loss drop 
by drop distilled, 

I shall boast it mine, the balsam, bless each kindly 
wrench that wrung 

From life’s tree its inmost virtue, tapped the root 
whence pleasure sprung, 

Barked the bole, and broke the bough, and bruised the 
berry, left all grace 

Ashes in death’s stern alembic, loosed elixir in its place.” 


»). Fifthly, all these enlarged conceptions of 
God, of Society, of the worth of the Individual, 
and of the largeness of Life, meet in the compre- 
hensive doctrine of the later Judaism as to the 
Coming of God in the Person of His Anointed to 
judge the world, for the avenging of wrong-doing 
and for the establishment of the Divine Kingdom. 

The Apocalyptic dreams nourished in the Es- 
sene communities and elsewhere during the last 
two centuries of the Old Testament dispensation, 
bring to a focal point not merely the hope of 
Israel but also “the desirable things of the na- 
tions” which it was the mission of Judaism to 
clarify and interpret. 

There were, of course, pagan throwbacks not a 
few, revivals of old dreams of a restored nation 
with its secular monarchy. There were manifold 
differences and inconsistencies in the visions re- 


The Christ in Judaism 69 


ceived and proclaimed. Some looked for a king- 
dom both of and in the world; others had their 
eyes lifted beyond the grave and the resurrection 
of the dead. 

But the essence of the hope in all was the same, 
however crude the terms in which that hope was 
clothed. Men knew that God was drawing near to 
give answer to the universal yearning. They knew 
that out of that shaking of heaven and earth 
which His appearing must bring about, there 
would dawn the beginning of a new and better 
day. As in their own experience the veil had been 
taken away from many of the things in which the 
heathen believed concerning God and human life, 
so a new rending of the veil was about to come, 
and beyond it a new revelation of God. The old 
primitive world together with the Jewish world— 
David cum Sibylla—are ready to join in one 
sublime acclamation: 


“Say among the nations, The Lord reigneth: 

The world also is stablished that it cannot be moved: 
He shall judge the people with equity. 

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; 
Let the sea roar and the fulness thereof; 

Let the field exult and all that is therein; 

Then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy 
Before the Lord, for He cometh; 

For He cometh to judge the earth.” 


6. One last point. In closing the chapter on 
Primitive Religion I pointed out that the primi- 
tive world could not escape contact with the 


70 The Universal Faith 


method of the Cross. “Without shedding of blood” 
there was not only no remission of sins, but also 
little entrance into any of the privileges of life. 

So it was in the case of the Jew. In a sense 
never intended by the utterers, the words, “His 
blood be on us and on our children,” have proved 
true, not for hurt but for healing. In a very real 
sense the best power of the Jew has come from his 
sharing the Cross with Him Whom the rulers re- 
jected and blasphemed. The victims of the “Ghet- 
to’s plague” and the Inquisition might well plead: 


“Thou! if thou wast he, who at midnight came, 

By the star-light, naming a dubious name! 

And if, too heavy with sleep—too rash 

With fear—O thou, if that martyr gash 

Fell on thee coming to take thy own, 

And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne— 
Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus. 

But the Judgment over, join sides with us! 

Thine too is the cause.” 


Yes, reflecting its light back over the martyrs of 
Judaism who perished under the persecution of 
Antiochus Epiphanes, and long before as long af- 
ter, we see that the “stumbling block of the Cross” 
was the essential method accepted for the shaping 
of the Servant People, as it was for the Ideal Ser- 
vant Who came to represent them and all the 
ignorant ages before them. 

The best way of finishing this chapter is along 
the line of this particular thought. Let me quote 


The Christ in Judaism 7\ 


a passage from the Jewish poetess, Emma Laz- 
arus, which expresses what I have tried to say: 


“Day long I brooded upon the Passion of Israel. 

I saw him bound to the wheel, nailed to the cross, cut 
off by the sword, burned at the stake, tossed into 
the seas. 

And always the same patient, resolute martyr face arose 
in silent rebuke and defiance. 

A Prophet with four eyes; wide gazed the orbs of the 
Spirit above the sleeping eyelids of the senses. 

A Poet, who plucked from his bosom the quivering heart 
and fashioned it into a lyre. 

A placid-browed Sage, uplifted from earth in celestial 
meditation. 

These I saw, with prince and people in their train; the 
monumental dead and the standard-bearers of the 
future. 

And suddenly I heard a burst of mocking laughter; and, 
turning, I beheld the shuffling gait, the ignominious 
features, the sordid mask of the son of the Ghetto. 

Turn again, O daughter of Israel, my sister, and behold, 
with divinely awakened eyes the son of man, the 
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. 

‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of 
these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ Who 
has ever spoken words so tender and close, so ful- 
filled of the brotherhood of man? ‘And I, if I be 
lifted up, will draw all men unto me.’ 

Be ye then uplifted, ye who would uplift. Ye who come 
in his name and yet deny him, with Christ on your 
lips but with hatred and scorn in your hearts, be- 
hold the suffering child of God, your brother; be- 
hold our divine humanity crushed beneath the bur- 
den of the flesh, the sins and sorrows of the world! 

Ye who would bear witness to his spirit and his truth, 
to the Christ that is within you, look with the eyes 


72 


The Universal Faith 


of Christ, the heart of Christ; pierce with illumi- 
nated vision the hollow mask; let the warm rays, 
the gentle touch of love, fall upon the dull clod of 
clay and awake the sleeping soul, the higher, the 
divine self, that slumbers in every child of earth, 
every one of God’s creatures,—the Christ that is 
to be, when all men know themselves as he knew, 
one with the Father and one with his fellowmen.” 


CHAPTER IV 


GIFTS AT THE CHRIST CRADLE 


“I dare at times imagine to my need 

Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
Unlimited in capability 

For joy, as this is in desire for joy, 

—To seek which, the joy hunger forces us: 

That stung by straitness of our life, made strait 
On purpose to make prized the life at large— 
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death, 
We burst there, as the worm into the fly, 

Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no! 
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, 

He must have done so, were it possible.” 


—Browning, Cleon. 


SYNOPSIS 


“The glory of the nations” brought to the Cradle as 
well as to the Cross—the coming of the Magi—not only 
a prophecy—but also a history—the religions of the 
world, as related to Judaism, of three types—first, the 
primitive religions already dealt with—secondly, the 
ethnic religions brought into historic contact with 
Judaism—thirdly, the religions of the Hast only indi- 
rectly related. 

This chapter to deal with the second type—what did 
Babylon contribute to Judaism?—the victory of light 
over darkness—Marduk and Tiamft—the significance of 
Ziggurat worship—the germ of Messianic doctrine in the 


fis 


74 The Universal Faith 


patesi—the quest for immortality—the law code of Ham- 
murabi—the moral ideals of Babylon. 

The contribution of Egypt—the desire for renewed 
life—justification through Osiris—the advancing concep- 
tion of God to the monolatry of Ikhnatun. 

The contribution of Persia—‘Cyrus, My Anointed”— 
the Persian angelology—-Ahuramazda, Spirit, Light, Wis- 
dom, Righteousness—the law of righteousness—“Good 
Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds’—the Judgment and 
the future life—the Patet Hrani. 

The gift of Greece—the ideals of Hellenism—the Hel- 
lenism in Christianity—the Greek language—the Septu- 
agint—the evolutionary element in Greek theology—the 
Mysteries and the doctrine of the future life—the moral 
teaching of the Greek—Socrates as witness for Christ— 
‘Lead thou me on, O Zeus.” 

The gift of Rome—the gift of the catholic idea—the 
reign of universal law—the vision of world peace—how 
Rome became Babylon—yet still an ideal—Zola’s dream 
of a “third Rome.” 


LLUSION was made in our last chapter to 
that glowing vision of the New Testament 
Apocalyptist in which appears the perfect four- 
square city which represents the kingdom of re- 
deemed humanity. Through the open gates of that 
City of God which is also the City of Man, enter 
from every point of the compass “the glory of the 
nations.” 

In this picture we have the prophecy of that 
final universality which we have claimed as the 
consummation of the Christian religion, the uni- 
versality which is to be as rich and harmonious 
as the potentialities of national and individual 
life. That the ultimate religion which is to lay 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 75 


claim to the allegiance of men must be of this 
character has been our assumption from the start 
and to it we shall return again and again. 

But at this point it is important to note some- 
thing else, namely, that the glory of the nations 
is brought to the cradle of the universal faith as 
well as to its triumph and its throne. 

This is the significance of that beautiful story 
of Leading, Seeking, and Finding which tells of 
the coming of the Magi to pay their adoration at 
the cradle of the Christ at Bethlehem. 

The author of the first Gospel was a Jew, and 
throughout intensely conscious of the part played 
by the Jew in the preparation for the Kingdom. 
Hence it is all the more significant that it is S. 
Matthew, and he alone, who introduces this story 
of the coming of the Wise Men to greet with gifts 
the new-born King. 

From the first century onward the imagination 
of artist and poet lent itself freely to the embroi- 
dery of the story with fanciful details as to the 
number, nationality, and name of these mysterious 
visitors to Bethlehem. 

It was felt to be the prophecy of the final satis- 
faction all were to find in the coming of the 
Christ. “Then are they glad because they are at 
rest, and so He bringeth them to the haven where 
they would be.” As Gilbert Chesterton puts it: 

“The crazy stable close at hand, 


With shaking timber and shifting sand, 
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand 


76 The Universal Faith 


Than the square stones of Rome.... 

To an open house at evening 

Home shall all men come, 

To an older place than Eden, 

And a taller town than Rome. 

To the end of the way of the wandering star... 
(Where) all men are at home.” 


But the story is more than prophecy; it is the 
gathering up of a great historical fact. Neither the 
sober commentator on the story nor the imagina- 
tive interpreter of the story has seemed really 
conscious of the full import of this significant 
aspect. That we have here the prediction of the 
part that East and West are to play in perfecting 
the glory of the established kingdom is conceded, 
but the emphasizing of the fact that Gentile as 
well as Jew had their homage to pay and their 
contribution to make at the very founding of the 
Kingdom has been rare and slight. Yet, through 
the Magi in this old story, whatever may be its 
historic value, we are enabled to see the religions 
of the world claiming their right to share with 
the Jew in the epiphany of the Christ. 

Thus, as it was open to the symbolists of old 
to describe the Wise Men as the representatives 
of Europe, Asia, and Africa, so it is open to the 
modern poet, in The Light of the World, to repre- 
sent them as “three travelled Masters” from India 
bearing— 

“Red gold from Indian rocks, cunningly beat 


To plate and chalice, with old fables sweet 
Of Buddha’s compassion.” 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 77 


So, moreover, it is meet to give them still larger 
significance, as we do here, namely, as the repre- 
sentatives of the faith of all who— 
“Rowing hard against the stream, 
Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, 
And did not deem it was a dream.” 

At the beginning of the last chapter I spoke of 
the Hebrew Scriptures as forming an Old Testa- 
ment in a somewhat specialized sense, because of 
the special part designed by Providence to be 
played by Israel, for geographical and historical 
reasons, and because of the special concern of 
those scriptures with the lineage of the Christ. 

We claimed, nevertheless, the use of the Hebrew 
Old Testament as furnishing an example of the 
way in which other literatures and other histories 
may be interpreted in order to make sacred what 
else might have been deemed secular and profane. 
To this aspect of the subject we must now return. 
Our task is to ask what was the gold, frankin- 
cense, and myrrh that the older world brought to 
the Christ cradle. 

We may relate these older religions to Chris- 
tianity through the mediating Judaism under 
three different heads, in the order of their rela- 
tive proximity: 

1. There are the primitive religions, present, 
as we have seen, in the sources of the religion of 
Israel. Those with which we have dealt have been 
Semitic, but they are, nevertheless, typical of 
primitive religion the world over, and express 


78 The Universal Faith 


similar ideas in theology, even as they gave rise 
to similar practices and institutions. 

2. In the next place are the religions of a more 
definitely ethnic character, which made their con- 
tributions to the religion of the Jew in the course 
of Hebrew history, much as tributaries feed the 
main stream of a river. Such are the religions of 
Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome. 

3. Lastly, there are the religions which at no 
time came into anything but the most indirect 
relation with Judaism, but which must neverthe- 
less be interpreted by the key placed in our hands 
when we understand the relation of the Hebrew 
Old Testament to the New Testament of the Chris- 
tian dispensation. Such, we shall see, are the re- 
ligions of China and India. 

To the religious conceptions of the first class 
we have already, though with necessary brevity, 
paid some attention. In this chapter we must treat 
of the second class of religions, before we attempt 
to show Christianity as the answer to Jew and 
Gentile alike. 

In the religion of Babylon there were many ele- 
ments which were crude and dark and repellent, 
elements which because of their crudeness were 
necessarily regarded by the Jew as among the 
“beggarly elements” to be rejected and discarded. 
The “crude procedures of savage sorcerers” were 
indeed so prominent that in a ritualized form 
some of them have established a kind of black art 
reaching down to our own time. Yet on the other 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 79 


hand there were from the earliest Sumerian and 
Babylonian ages germs of vital religious truths 
which it was the mission of Judaism to accept, 
preserve, and develop. The chief of these are as 
follows: 

i. The history of the world is represented as a 
struggle between the forces of light and darkness, 
with victory resting ultimately with the light. 
However physical may be the materials of this 
marvellous duel, dramatized as it may have been 
from the observed struggle between the sea and the 
land at the head of the Persian gulf, it is plain 
that the conflict between Marduk and the monster 
Tiamat furnished material for conceiving the 
apocalyptic war between light and darkness, good 
and evil, which was to have immense spiritual re- 
sult. 

ii. In the Babylonian ziggurat worship, with 
its effort to reach the dwelling place of the gods 
by means of the temple towers divided into the 
planetary spheres, there was symbolised, first, 
the possibility of God descending to communion 
with mortal men, and, secondly, the possibility 
of men ascending to communion with God. Crude 
as was the imagining which placed the dwelling- 
place of deity on a mountain height, or, in de- 
fault of the mountain, at the top of some man- 
built tower, it had in it the germ of all subsequent 
pictures of the City of God, with its twelve 
courses of varicolored precious stones, within 
which God might dwell, and man in the presence 


80 The Universal Faith 


of God. Whatever half-way errors the idea con- 
tained, such as we associate with the Gnostic 
theories of emanations, aeons, and the like, it was 
an idea most precious and significant for the fu- 
ture of religion. In that topmost chamber where 
a priestess resided who was regarded as “the 
spouse of God,” we find the first intuition of hu- 
manity as to that relation to be established be- 
tween God and man accepted in the New Testa- 
ment as the relation between the Lamb and the 
Bride. It is a picture of the redeemed society in 
which “the King woos His glorious Queen” ; it is, 
moreover, a picture of the human heart prepared 
to be the dwelling place of “the high and lofty 
One that inhabiteth eternity,” the Bridechamber 
of the soul :— 


“The hold that falls not when the town is got, 
The heart’s heart, whose immured plot 

Hath keys yourself keep not.— 

Its keys are at the cincture hung of God; 
Its gates are trepidant to His nod; 

By Him its floors are trod.” 


iii. In the divine rulership through the patesi, 
or priest-king (cf. Melchizedek in Gen. xiv), repre- 
sented as the son of the god, we have the earliest 
germ of the Messianic doctrine. Without human 
father or mother, “a priest for ever,” the patesi 
is the “shepherd”; he is, almost in the language 
of Isaiah (ix 6), “exalted king, chief counselor, 
the subduer, princely leader, great lord.” 

iv. In the already commenced quest for immor- 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 81 


tality we have an element of religion which leads 
right on to the satisfaction of that quest in Christ. 
The words of Sabitu to Gilgamesh :— 
“When the gods created mankind 
They fixed death for mankind. 
Life they retained in their own hands. 
O Gilgamesh, let thy belly be filled, 
Day and night be merry, daily arrange a merry-making. 
Day and night be joyous and contented, 
Let thy garments be pure, thy head be washed. 
Wash thyself with water. 
Regard the little one who takes hold of thy hand, 
Enjoy the wife lying in thy bosom’’— 
are as little final to the hero of the Babylonian 
epic as are the similar words of Ecclesiastes (ix 
7-9) to the Jew. The mention of the water of life 
whereby Ishtar is restored by Namtu, the very 
failure of Gilgamesh to retain the plant of immor- 
tality which Utnapishtim enables him to discover, 
or to raise up more than the ghost of his friend 
Kngidu, represent the seriousness of this age-long 
quest. Moreover, the seasonal myth, in the form 
of the story of Tammuz and Ishtar, made Nature 
partner with man in demanding on the part of 
religion faith in more abundant life. And the bit- 
ter regrets of Adapa for his failure to receive the 
proffered “bread of life’ and “drink of life” at 
the hand of the gods emphasizes the same impor- 
tant truth. 

v. The Laws of Hammurabi, resting as they do 
upon codes and traditions long anterior even to 
the first Babylonian dynasty, must be regarded as 


82 The Universal Faith 


part of that revelation of law which we rightly 
call divine, a revelation given from Shamash as 
well as from Yahweh, and in both cases prepara- 
tory to the diviner law of Christ, written not on 
“tables of stone” but on “the fleshy tables of the 
heart.” 

vi. Lastly, the moral and spiritual aspiration, 
expressing itself in prayer and in hymns of peni- 
tence, or in such phrases as the following: 

“Daily approach thy God 

With offering and prayer as an excellent incense; 

Before thy God come with a pure heart,” 
show men already on the rungs of that ladder of 
sunbeams which slopes through darkness up to 
God. 

Yet all the might of Babylon was not great 
enough, apart from the help of the Jew, to bring 
these hints and anticipations of universal relig- 
ion to present them at the cradle of the Christ. 

2. The case of Lgypt is not unlike that of Baby- 
lon. The bondage of Egypt did not dispose the cap- 
tive tribes to fall in love with the religion of their 
masters. There were, moreover, survivals of to- 
temism in the animal worship of Egypt which 
Israel had outgrown, though some of the tribes 
still bore the old animal standards which may 
have had a similar origin. 

Yet there was much in the religion of Egypt 
which was bound to be appreciated and which en- 
tered more or less unconsciously into the faith 
carried away by Israel to Canaan. 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 83 


i. In spite of the provision made for the dead, 
Egyptian religion was concerned as much as any 
other with life. The kings of Egypt were not con- 
tent to “lie with the Pyramids over their head” 
in long and dreamless sleep. They loved life so 
much that they were ready to fight their way into 
the immortality of the blessed gods. Some of the 
oldest inscriptions of Egypt, namely, the famous 
Pyramids Texts of the 5th Dynasty (2625 B. C.), 
represent the kings as “bluffing” their way into 
life by boasting of their unimaginable might. So 
again we find the Babylonian seasonal myth of 
Tammuz and Ishtar paralleled with that of Osiris 
and Isis. There is infinite pathos in the cry which 
was the annual Easter anthem of the Egyptian: 
“He wakes, Osiris wakes, the weary god awakes 
and stands; he controls his body again. Stand up, 
thou shalt not end; thou shalt not perish.” 

ii. Secondly, the risen Osiris becomes, as in the 
ritual of The Book of the Dead, the means of 
justification for the penitent sinner, so that the 
justified one, with his new name, Osiris N. or M., 
may pass on to joy in the presence of the gods. 
The very fact that the future life, in contradis- 
tinction to that of the early Semites, is here 
moralized, shows that Egypt had some gift to 
render. 

iii. Thirdly, the conception of God with the 
Egyptian was one which might readily march on 
with the developments we have already sketched, 
until it was capable of bearing witness to the the- 


84 The Universal Faith 


ology of the Christian. Beginning with local, pos- 

sibly totemistic, gods, transforming these into a 

divine hierarchy with the federation of the city 

states and the union of Upper and Lower Egypt, 

Egyptian theology gradually centres itself in the 

Sun-god Amén or Ré, as the case might be, at 

Thebes or Memphis, till a final step is attempted 

by the idealist Ikhnatun, with his proclamation 

of Atun, god of the solar disk, as the one true 

deity. How nearly the witness of the Egyptian 

rose to the heights attained by the Hebrew may 

be seen if we compare with the 104th Psalm that 

glorious hymn of Atun from which I must only 

quote a paragraph: 

“Oreator of the germ and maker of the seed, 

Thou givest life to the son in the body of the mother, 

Soothing him that he may not weep, 

Nursing him in the womb, 

Giving breath to animate all. 

When in the shell the fledgling chirps in the egg, 

Thou givest him breath to preserve him alive, 

And when Thou hast brought him to burst the shell, 

Then cometh he forth from the egg to chirp with all 
his might. 

Manifold are Thy works, sole God, whose power none 
other possesseth.” 


One might easily dwell upon other elements of 
Egyptian religion which it was important that 
the Jew should not forget, but the above hints 
must suffice. 

3. The debt of Hebrew religion to the faith of 
Persia is large and more direct than in the cases 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 85 


already mentioned. It is obvious that the Juda- 
ism which acknowledged a Persian monarch as 
“the anointed of Yahweh” for the accomplish- 
ment of the deliverance from Babylon, and whose 
destiny it was to live for two centuries under the 
government of Zoroastrian kings, must inevitably 
absorb from Persia some elements of the national 
religion. Reference needs only to be made to such 
matters as the Zoroastrian system of angelology, 
with its “holy immortal ones,” the Amshaspands, 
who become for the Jew “the Seven Spirits of 
God,” or with its “guardian angels” for the na- 
tions (as in Daniel) and for individuals (as in 
the New Testament). 

But there are elements of greater importance. 

i. The God of the Zoroastrian is no longer, as 
in the Veda, a Nature god. He is Spirit, He is 
Light, He is Wisdom, and He is Righteousness. 
Behind all spiritual powers is Asha, the law of 
righteousness, and Ahuramazda is eternally op- 
posed to Angra-mainyu, the Lie, the Counter- 
worker, who must finally be defeated, by the help 
of man. 

ii. Thus religion is on the side of Light and 
Right. It is a moral choice. “The Will of the Lord 
is the Law of Righteousness.” Good Thoughts, 
Good Words, Good Deeds,—these make up the 
life of the believer here and these meet him here- 
after in lovely guise. 

iii. The doctrine of the future life is, even more 
than in the case of Egypt, moralized. For the 


86 The Universal Faith 


good is reserved the blessedness of Paradise (the 
word carries with it the story of its origin) ; for 
the evil Hell gapes with unimaginable horror. 
iv. What else there may be of the ancient faith 
of Zoroaster to be carried over, fully developed, 
into the religion of mankind, may be gathered 
from the language of its Creed, the Patet Erani: 


“T believe in the good faith. I believe in the coming 
Resurrection, in the later body, in the passage of the 
Bridge of Judgment, in .a future recompense of good 
deeds, and in the punishment hereafter of evil deeds; 
in the perpetual state of Paradise for the good and in 
the annihilation of hell, of the Evil One, and of all the 
evil demons. I believe that Ormuzd will at last be vic- 
torious, and that Ahriman will perish, together with all 
the offshoots of darkness. All that I ought to have 
thought and have not thought, all that I ought to have 
said and have not said, all that I ought to have done 
and have not done, all that I ought to have commanded 
others to do and have not commanded, and all that I 
ought not to have thought and yet have thought, and all 
that I ought not to have said and yet have said, all that 
I ought not to have done and yet have done, all that I 
ought not to have commanded and yet have commanded, 
—for every thought, word, and deed, whether of the body 
or of the spirit, whether of earth or of heaven, I pray 
for forgiveness and repent of every sin with this Patet.” 


Surely those who have supposed that of the 
Wise Men who came to Bethlehem at least one 
was a disciple of Zoroaster have not greatly erred. 

4, What are we to say of the gift of Greece? 
Greeks, we are told, came desirous to see Christ 
before His Passion. No less certainly does Greece 
bring her gifts to the Cradle. It would take a 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 87 


volume instead of a paragraph or two to do jus- 
tice to this fact. 

i. There is first the ideal itself of the true 
Greece. Hellenism has often enough been set over 
against Hebraism as an antithesis,—‘the vine- 
wreathed god” over against the God “with a 
crown of thorns.” There is no such necessary 
antithesis. The Greek ideal of beauty is not inevi- 
tably limited by that preoccupation with the car- 
nal which was its degradation and its parody. In- 
deed the Greek ideal was needed to yield that 
sense of the perfection of goodness which is sug- 
gested by the character of Christ. The perfect man 
is not only agathos (good) but kalos (beautiful) ; 
such is the implication of the term “Good (kalos) 
Shepherd” applied by Christ to Himself. “The 
beauty that endures upon the spiritual height” 
is the necessary crown for that goodness which 
has reached perfection, and the proper correction 
for that stern and puritanic conception of morals 
which the Jew retained from his wilderness ex- 
perience and from his struggle with the corrup- 
tions of Canaan. For the true Greek there was no 
divorce decreed between the Beautiful and the 
Good, for, in the words of Plato, “It is the clear 
view of truth, the possession of eternal beauty, 
the contemplation of absolute good, which makes 
up the life of the just and happy.” Thus, although 
there were times in Christian history when Puri- 
tanism was justified by way of revolt from the 
animalism of a degraded art, yet, from the “cot- 


88 The Universal Faith 


tage in the vale” to which she had for a time re- 
tired, Beauty continued to make her plea: 

“Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are 

So lightly, beautifully built; 


Perchance I may return with others there, 
When I have purged my guilt.” 


ii. In the second place, Greece put at the ser- 
vice of universal religion her superb language, 
one of the three tongues in which the kingship 
of Christ was to be proclaimed from the Cross, 
and the tongue in which the preparation for that 
proclamation by prophets and psalmists was to 
be made intelligible to the world. As Dean Stanley 
puts it (Jewish Church, III, 228): “It was the 
Septuagint which was the Bible of the Evangelists 
and Apostles in the first century, and of the Chris- 
tian Church for the first age of its existence, 
which is still the only recognized authorized text 
of the Eastern Church, and the basis of the only 
authorized text of the Latin Church.” “If ‘the 
noble army of translators,’ as they have been 
sometimes called, may look with affectionate ven- 
eration on Jerome’s cell at Bethlehem, on Luther’s 
study in the Castle of the Wartburg, on the Jeru- 
salem chamber, where once and again the majestic 
language of the English Bible has been revised, | 
yet the goal of their most sacred pilgrimage 
should be the narrow, rocky islet of the Alexan- 
drian harbor, where was kindled a brighter and 
more enduring beacon in the intellectual and re- 
ligious sphere even than the world-renowned 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 89 


Pharos, which in the maritime world has been 
the parent of all the lights that from shore to 
shore and sea to sea have guided the mariners for 
two thousand years.” 

iii. But Greece had also much to give out of her 
own evolutionary experience in religion. She too 
had had the divine leading. Only a little way be- 
neath the beautiful form of the classic myths are 
concealed grossnesses, savageries, crudenesses, 
such as mark her own first contacts with the 
primitive. It was out of an intermingling of the 
primitive, the Minoan, and the Indo-European 
that she arrived at the point where an apostle 
himself might appeal to her testimony in support 
of his message. Above all the creation of polythe- 
istic imagination there was a sense of God to 
whom S. Paul could point as One Who, although 
unknown, is yet the Father of all. Beyond the 
statues which made the city to the apostle’s eyes 
“full of idols,” the gods of licentious legend, there 
was a God proclaimed by the great poets and 
philosophers, All-powerful, All-wise, All-loving, 
and gracious to the good, the 

“Zeus, who leadeth men in wisdom’s way, 


And fixeth fast the law, 
Wisdom by pain to gain, 


the one of whom it might be said: 


“What a pilot is to a ship, a driver in a chariot, a 
leader in a chorus, law in a state, a commander in a 
camp, this is God in the Universe, except that to those 
ruling is wearisome and full of effort and full of care, 


90 The Universal Faith 


but to Him it is without worry, without toil, and free 
from all bodily weakness. For seated unmoved, He moves 
all things, and turns them where He wills and as He 
wills, in different shapes and measures.” 


Thus for Greece the gods were not always the 
deities lying “beside their nectar,” “careless of 
mankind,” but as, to quote Plato once again, those 
who “care about the small as well as about the 
great... . They are'perfectly good and the care 
of all things is most perfectly natural to them.” 

iv. In the fourth place, Greek religion had no 
unworthy idea of the proper issue of life beyond 
our present experience. To be conscious of God 
was to have hold upon the life of the immortals. 
It was comforting to men to think of Orpheus 
breaking into the realm of Hades in order to draw 
forth the soul of Eurydice. It was a joy to feel 
that the sacrifice of Alcestis in the interest of her 
selfish husband brings Heracles upon the scene to 
wrestle victoriously with Thanatos. The bringing 
back of wife and mother to the grief-stricken 
household fed the hopes of all men. It seemed 
worthy of the greatest of poets to proclaim a 
Zeus who “to the dead assigns the last great penal- 
ties,” and of the greatest of philosophers to assert 
that when the soul “has communion with the Di- 
vine, she is carried into another and better place, 
which is also divine and perfect in holiness.” 

y. Such truths as the above were set forth par- 
ticularly in the Mysteries which must certainly, 
without disparaging the belief in the divine origin 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 91 


of Christianity, be regarded as having contributed 
to the sacramental system of the Church. De- 
graded as the mysteries of Eleusis may sometimes 
have become in tantric orgies, uncertain as their 
ritual seems to have been from such notices as we 
have in Apuleius and others, they were yet ob- 
viously an incentive to personal religion and the 
dramatization of a hopeful creed. “Whatever ob- 
security,” says Dr. G. F. Moore (History of Re- 
ligions, I 454), “surrounds the rites at Eleusis, 
there is no concealment of the faith of those who 
took part in them. From the Homeric Hymn on, 
the assurance of a blessed immortality is the good 
which men seek and find in the mysteries; it is 
this which gave them their persistent attraction 
not only for the multitudes, but for the noblest 
souls among the Greeks.” 

Josephus may well be the spokesman for the 
Judaism which welcomed such a stream, and for 
us who see beyond it a spring of living water in 
every heart, when he accepts the Mysteries as a 
revelation made by God to the Gentile as well as 
to the Jew. 

vi. Once again, the moral teaching of the Greek 
was a gift to the world from God. At the time 
when Christianity commenced its course, Greece 
was “living Greece no more.” Nevertheless, the 
testimony of the sages stood, and from the trans- 
figured band of those who, before the day of 
Christ, witnessed for Christ, none may rule out 
the name of Socrates. “Socrates drinking the hem- 


92 The Universal Faith 


lock” has a part with “Jesus on the rood.” It has 
been well said that “not only in the Man of Sor- 
rows, as depicted by the Evangelical Prophet, but 
in the anticipations of the Socratic dialogues, 
there was the vision, even to the very letter, of 
the Just Man, scorned, despised, condemned, tor- 
tured, slain, by an ungrateful or stupid world, 
yet still triumphant.” 

It is the touch of the inevitable Cross upon the 
very religion which, among all the religions of 
the ancient world, was thought to have turned its 
back most definitely upon that Cross. Hear the 
last words of Socrates before his judges, and say 
if we can exclude this man from the company of 
those who were handing down a gift, for the 
Christ of the Cradle and the Cross alike to deem 
precious in His sight: 

“You, too, O judges, it behooves to be of good hope 
about death, and to believe that this at least is true,— 


that there can no evil befall a good man, whether he be 
alive or dead, nor are his affairs uncared for by the gods.” 


Is it not plain that the Jew Philo was not false 
to the mission of his own race in receiving from 
the religion of the Greek ideas which he could 
blend with the revelation given to his fathers to 
form the doctrine of the Logos? Nor, receiving 
from the Greek, was he unrelated to the Christian 
future, since the truth he taught was to pass into 
the stream of Christology, made personal and real 
in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, to Whom Plato, 
no less than Isaiah, witnessed when he described 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 93 


the perfect man as one who is the best and is es- 
teemed the worst, and at the end is tortured, im- 
paled, and slain? 

Surely, here too we are meant to find the god- 
ward attitude, such as made the Jew the chosen 
servant to lead the pupil into the presence of the 
Christ, and so guide his feet “into the way of 
peace.” The Greek too had his compelling prayer: 


“Lead thou me on, O Zeus! 
And thou, O Destiny! 
Whithersoever thou ordainest 
Unflinching will I follow; 
But if from wicked heart 
IT will it not, 

Still must I follow.” 


5. We must finish this chapter with a few words 
respecting the gift of Rome. There are here sev- 
eral difficulties to be encountered, apart from the 
common difficulty of compressing into a page or 
two the most essential and outstanding points. 
We have first the difficulty which arises from the 
fact that the history of Roman religion is “chiefly 
the history of the introduction and more or less 
complete naturalization of foreign religions.” 
There is much that is the residuum of primitive 
beliefs and cults, the worship of the indigita- 
menta, or functional gods; much that is survival 
from old Etruscan superstitions and practices; 
much also which was simply borrowed bodily 
from the Greek, although frequently enough dis- 
guised with different names. 


94 The Universal Faith 


A second difficulty springs from the impossibil- 
ity of drawing the line precisely at the point 
where the Roman gift ceased to be indirect 
through the Jew and became direct in its influ- 
ence upon the already established Christian 
Church. For this reason it is hard to know in what 
way to use the witness of the Stoics, ce nuage 
frangé de rayons qui touche presquwa Vimmortelle 
aurore des verités chrétiennes. Whether Seneca, 
Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius are, as thinkers 
and moralists, in the right line of descent from 
Cleanthes, or whether they are themselves touched 
by the golden ray of the newly risen Christian 
revelation, we cannot, in either case, put them out- 
side the category of those minds “naturally Chris- 
tian” which illustrate the continuity of the Di- 
vine leading. If even “the fierce Tertullian” could 
speak of Seneca, saepe noster, it does not be- 
come us to be catholic in a less degree. 

But, outside of the witness of the Stoics, we 
have enough substance in the gift of Rome to un- 
derstand why the title of the Saviour upon the 
Cross was written in Latin as well as in Hebrew 
and in Greek, and to appreciate also the represen- 
tative character of the centurion’s outspoken 
faith. 

i. Rome gave to the first Christian apostles that 
vision of catholicity which is so powerfully re- 
flected in the missionary strategy of 8S. Paul. With 
her Divine representative, Augustus, Divus, ruler 
over what appeared to be a Universe, Rome was 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 95 


at once the symbol, as she became also the parody, 
of the world-wide dominion of the Christ. That 
“the kingdoms of the world” were to become “the 
kingdom of our God and of His Christ,” that “all 
peoples, nations, kindreds, tongues” were to ac- 
cept His authority, was a vision assisted not a 
little by the spectacle of political achievement 
which had welded nations, east and west, into 
one great Imperial entity, all of which paid trib- 
ute to the lord who sat upon the seven hills of 
Rome. Presently, of course, the symbolism was 
to bring out, by its very truth, the contrasts be- 
tween the brutishness and falsehood of the ma- 
terial Rome and the vision of the City of God. But, 
in the years preceding the persecution of Nero, it 
is not to be forgotten that it was Rome which gave 
S. Paul the sense of scope for his evangel; it was 
Rome again which offered to the apostle’s feet 
the roads which led from city to city through the 
Empire; it was Rome whose even-handed justice 
ensured his protection time and time again 
against the violence of the mob. 

ii. It was from Rome, in the second place, that, 
with the vision of catholicity, came the expecta- 
tion of an universal law, of an order, like the 
order of Camelot, 

“Where all about a healthful people moved, 
As in the presence of a gracious king.” 

The sense of law which ran through the Roman 
system had, when divorced from other things, its 
mischievous influence in later days, in making 


96 The Universal Faith 


too rigid and precise both the thinking and the 
acting of Christian men, but in these early days, 
in its influence upon the organization and the 
administration of the Christian communities, we 
cannot doubt that it was a providential gift for 
the extension of that spiritual kingdom which, 
first inspired by the conception of so vast an em- 
pire, was destined in time to proclaim its message 
in “regions Caesar never knew.” 

iii. To the expectation of universal empire, un- 
der the reign of universal law, was added the hope 
of universal peace, the beginning of that new age 
which, after all the troubles of the Republic, 
seemed predicted by the auspicious accession of 
Octavius Caesar. It makes little difference what 
the immediate occasion may have been for the 
writing by Vergil of the Fourth Hclogue, or the 
writing by Horace of his Carmen Saeculare; both 
poets prophesied better than they knew: 

“A mighty line of ages springs anew; 

The Maid returns and Saturn’s golden prime; 

From heaven on high a new-born race descends.” 

In course of time Rome became, as has been 
Said, the parody rather than the type of the City 
of God. As “the mystic Babylon” she became the 
antithesis of “the new Jerusalem,” the symbol of 
the harlot-society doomed to the destroying judg- 
ment of an all-holy God. 

Nevertheless, through all the smoke of apoc- 
alypse, Rome still emerges as a wonderful and 
inspiring idea. 


Gifts at the Christ Cradle 97 


We can well understand how the Abbé Pierre 
Froment in Zola’s Rome could take his stand upon 
the hills outside the Sacred City, and “in the soft 
and veiled light of that lovely morning” could 
dream of all “the Rome of that first meeting, the 
Rome of early morning,” suggested to his san- 
guine soul. “What a shout of coming redemption 
seemed to arise from her house roofs, what a 
promise of universal peace seemed to issue from 
that sacred soil, twice already Queen of the 
World.” 

Perhaps we too may dream with the Abbé of 
what that “third Rome” might be, if we could see 
all that its history suggests poured forth with 
humble adoration at the cradle of a new-born 
Christ. Then indeed, while we still continued to 
sing our “Jerusalem the Golden,’ we should have 
also in our hearts and on our lips the greeting: 


Ave, Roma Immortalis. 


CHAPTER V 


THE GIFT OF THE EAST 


“IT dreamed 
That stone by stone I reared a sacred fane, 
A temple; neither Pagod, Mosque, nor Church, 
But loftier, simpler, always open-doored 
To every breath from Heaven; and Truth and. Peace 
And Love and Justice came and dwelt therein.” 


—Tennyson, Akbar’s Dream. 


SYNOPSIS 


How Buddhism entered India—was Buddhism indebted 
to Christianity ?—the relation of Oriental religions to 
Christianity—these, too, expectant of the Messiah. 

The place of Confucius in Chinese religion—transmit- 
ter, not originator—mistaken criticism by missionaries 
—and by “Young China”—what Confucius has done for 
China—the emphasis on virtue—story of “the Four 
Knowings’—‘“the Great Learning’—emphasis on social 
obligation—doctrine of the “five Relations’—the stabil- 
ity of China—limitations of Confucianism—the reign of 
Law, not of Grace,—need of Christus Consummator. 

Taoism—the Doctrine of the Way—the quietism of 
Lao Tzu—the ethics of Taoism—the Tao Téh King—the 
weakness and degradation of Taoism—China’s need of 
the spiritual—‘Jesus is left alone.” 

Buddhism—the attraction of Gautama—how the 
Buddha became S. Josaphat—the sense of pity in Budd- 


98 


The Gift of the East 99 


hism—the first universal religion—a missionary relig- 
ion—the developments of Mahayana—Buddhism in China 
and Japan—Amida worship—the failure of Buddhism— 
its sense of impermanence and unreality in man and 
God—the cure of sorrow illusory—the eternal note of 
sadness—“Buddhism abandons the world; Christ would 
redeem it.” 

What is Hinduism ?—development from Nature wor- 
ship to Pantheism—from Karma Kanda to Jnana Kanda 
—thence to bhakti—religious elements unsynthesised— 
the contributions to religion of Hinduism—association of 
religion and life—spiritual conception of the universe— 
the supremacy of the divine—the doctrine of Avatars— 
the splendor of Krishna—its weakness—sense of un- 
reality—-what Hinduism needs from Christ—the fulfil- 
ment of Akbar’s dream—‘‘Ferryman, take me across.” 





FAMILIAR account of the introduction of 
Buddhism into China, relates that about 
A. D. 64 the Chinese Emperor Ming Ti had a 
dream, in which he beheld in his courtyard a 
golden man with two arrows in his hand. Sum- 
moning his soothsayers, the Emperor enquired of 
them what the vision meant, and was told it was 
sent to acquaint them of the birth in the far West 
of a great teacher and mighty lord of men. Forth- 
with Ming Ti sent his ambassadors, who reached 
at length the court of Gondophorus, the Indo- 
Parthian king of North-west India. There the 
Chinese envoys received the news of the Buddha, 
together with books and images which they car- 
ried back with them to their native land. 
Now it has always been a question as to how 
far the Mahayana Buddhism thus introduced into 


100 The Universal Faith 


the Middle Kingdom had already intermingled 
with Christian and other western influences. 
Christian legend speaks of the Apostle S. Thomas 
as having labored in the realm of the same Indian 
prince at this very time. But, whatever may have 
been the elements of religion transmitted by this 
particular channel from west to east, affecting 
the religions of the Orient, it is quite plain that 
these religions, like those we considered in the 
last chapter, had their necessary part in prepar- 
ing for a world religion, not as supplying some- 
thing lacking in Christianity, but as representing 
a need to which Christianity, rather than anything 
within themselves, was the answer, and offering 
for religion that without which Christianity 
would but imperfectly achieve its manifold pos- 
sibilities. 

Let us see in the present chapter just what the 
relation is between Christianity and the religions 
of the Orient, in order that we may be the better 
prepared in our next chapter to understand the 
fulness with which Christ answers to the religious » 
necessities of mankind. 

In the last chapter we saw that the world re- 
ligions of the past all helped to swell the tide of 
faith and hope which was brought to the cradle 
of the Christ; how each religion, with a sense 
more or less clear of what was needed to carry 
the soul through the mysteries of life and death, 
bore its witness to these needs, expectant, in com- 
mon with the Jew, of its Messiah. 


The Gift of the East 101 


Here we shall set ourselves to behold humanity 
conscious of the same lack, but standing afar off, 
like the leper in the Gospel, waiting for the com- 
passionate word and the healing touch. Yet, in 
all this waiting, in the very formulation of the 
plea, “Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me 
clean!” we shall see evidence of the fact that here, 
too, God has not left Himself without witness. 
Here too, in the great historic religions of the 
Orient at the present day, the universal faith to 
which the countless millions of India, China, and 
Japan turn their eyes, is that for which the Jew 
yearned as the consummation of his own age-long 
hope. 

In the space at our disposal we shall be able to 
touch but four of these religions, selecting those 
of most wide-spread importance at the present 
day. Moreover, we shall exclude any consideration 
of Muhammadanism, preferring to think of that 
system as an imperfect or heretical form of Juda- 
ism or Christianity. 

1. Let us ask first of all what must be the rela- 
tion of Christianity to that ancient and deeply 
entrenched system which still to so large an ex- 
tent holds the allegiance of China,—Confucian- 
ism. 

No more than any other of the religions upon 
which we have touched can Confucianism be 
thought of apart from its antecedents. The Sage 
claimed to be a transmitter rather than an origin- 
ator, and his teaching can no more be separated 


102 The Universal Faith 


from the primitive rites of ancestor-worship and 
divination than could the religion of Israel be 
separated from the Semitic cults out of which it 
grew. Nor may Confucianism be separated from 
that complicated, system of State worship which 
it helped to maintain and to which it gave so 
much beautiful and suggestive symbolism. 

Yet, in gathering these things together into a 
system and making of them a tradition, Confucius 
was certainly preparing China for some still bet- 
ter thing which neither he nor his disciples could 
possibly supply, perhaps could not even be ex- 
pected to appreciate. 

To-day Confucius is being attacked from two 
opposite quarters. First, from the side of the least 
intelligent missionary work such as sees hope for 
Christianity only after the making of a tabula 
rasa of all the past. Secondly, from a radical 
“Young China,” which regards the Sage as a fet- 
ter upon the feet of progress. Each of these views 
is, we believe, mistaken. Christ needs in China, 
as well as in Judaea, His John the Baptist to 
prepare the path for His coming. Not apart from 
the leading of the Holy Spirit have the prophets 
of China witnessed in time past to the fathers 
in divers manners. Progress itself needs the past 
in order to give stability from which, as a start- 
ing point, the forward step is taken. From neither 
point of view is Confucius China’s last word, yet 
neither Christianity nor a progressive civilization, 
if we can suppose the two things separable, may 


The Gift of the East 103 


benefit by the overthrow of the Sage’s pedestal. 
As a distinguished missionary teacher (Dr. Sooth- 
ill) has recently written: “While defective views 
of God and man’s relationship to Him have ham- 
pered the upward progress of the Chinese, their 
sages have been men worthy of all honor, whose 
faces have been set toward the sun, and away 
from the abomination of darkness in which some 
of the other nations of the earth have weltered.” 

There are just two contributions of immense 
significance which the cause of religion owes to 
Confucianism, contributions which “the Master of 
all good workmen” will surely acknowledge with 
a “Well done, good and faithful servant.” 

i. First, there is the emphasis on individual 
virtue. The ideal of the superior man, as one who 
must be constantly cultivating the moral sense 
“by obeying which they obtain a nature constantly 
right,” is one which has never been surpassed. 
That a man should daily judge himself in the 
forum of his own conscience is a great conception. 
That is a great conception, too, embodied in one 
of the smallest yet greatest of the Confucian 
classics, The Great Learning, which makes all 
education start with control over the thoughts 
and intents of the heart. Thus doing, man becomes 
the true sage and so rises to a potential rulership 
over family, state, and, if need be, the world it- 
self. The initial phrase of this tiny treatise runs 
as follows: “The way of education lies in eluci- 
dating lucid virtue, in the renovation of the peo- 


104 The Universal Faith 


ple, and in stopping short of nothing but the sum- 
mum bonum.” 

The story of the Four Knowings, which tells 
how an official replied to one who had tempted 
him to fraud with the plea, “No one will know,” 
“No one know? Why, I know, you know, Heaven 
knows, Earth knows,” illustrates the lofty ethical 
principles inculeated by Confucianism. It was a 
great thing, moreover, to have these principles 
embodied in so noble and pure minded a character 
as Confucius. ) 

Yet, although the ideal of the “superior man” 
thus lifts itself up towards the face of Christ, it 
is an ideal which can in no way dispense with that 
vitalizing and spiritualizing touch which only 
Christ may give. 

Confucius was cold and unsympathetic, even 
apparently to wife and son. “Knowing God only 
as a majesty and never as a Father, the spring of 
his affections could not bubble joyously forth.” 
The love which was so potent a force in the re- 
lation of Christ to His disciples, and which He 
offers to all the world, would have seemed to 
K’ung unworthy of a philosopher. 

Moreover, Confucius was in no sense the Truth, 
or the Way, or the Life. He “did not know the 
ford’; so, knowing less than perfectly the mean- 
ing of life, he could not explain the mystery of 
death. 

Once again, Confucius was by no means satis- 
fied with the travail of his own soul, with the vi- 


The Gift of the East 105 


sion of his victory ahead. His last utterance is the 
cry of the disappointed: 
“The great mountain must crumble, 
The strong beam must break, 
And the sage wither like grass.” 

ii. Secondly, there is strong emphasis on those 
bonds of social obligation which are comprised in 
what is called “the doctrine of the Five Rela- 
tions.” These are the relation of subject to ruler, 
of wife to husband, of son to father, of younger 
brother to elder brother, and of friend to friend. 
Casuistical as this doctrine was sometimes made 
out to be, it has a certain spiritual element, since 
in all things there is recognition of the spirits of 
the ancestors, and a sense of communion with the 
departed. 

What we have so far mentioned has gone far 
towards explaining China’s history as that of the 
longest lived of earthly governments, a staying of 
the tendency to disintegrate during times of poli- 
tical tyranny and anarchy, a binding of family to 
family and village to village, even a moulding of 
the incoming hordes of barbarians into conformity 
with Confucian ideals. In such ways as these the 
way was kept open, not ineffectively, for the sure 
coming of Him Who promises the gathering to- 
gether of His “other sheep.” 

Of course, all that Confucianism achieved made 
more obvious the need for this coming of Christ 
to complete what had been begun. The social glue 
of China, under the Confucian system, was not 


106 The Universal Faith 


Love, but Habit. It established the reign of Law, 
not of Grace. The hold on the spiritual world it 
offered did not by any means reach to God, the 
Father of all spirits. The sense of life, in spite of 
the worship offered to the dead, was ever incom- 
plete. Human nature, good as it was thought to 
be, was never lifted really above the sordidness 
of earth into a vision of the Communion of Saints. 
The quality of life was never transfigured by the 
inrush of all the Gospel has to give. 

So, while men may justly praise Confucius for 
what he was and for what he did, the political re- 
former and the Christian alike are right in requir- 
ing something more and better for the salvation of 
China. 

2. At the opposite extreme to Confucianism, in 
many respects, is J'aoism, a system which has de- 
served a happier fate than that which has over- 
taken it in modern times. A little senior to Con- 
fucius, Lao Tzu seems at first glance to have of- 
fered to China a something the more orthodox 
teaching of Confucius did not attempt to give. The 
doctrine of the Way is a doctrine of Grace rather 
than a preaching of the Law. “You cannot turn 
a pigeon into a crow by painting it black,” said 
the Old Philosopher. Life harnessed to the Way, 
which some have translated “the principle of 
things,” some “the Logos,” and which some have 
not hesitated to render “God,” must inevitably 
lead to success, achievement without struggle, the 
blessedness of the eternal and the absolute. 


The Gift of the East 107 


Nor was such a quietistic attitude without its 
. ethical side. Some of the most beautiful of all 
ethical maxims are to be found in the Taoist book, 
Kan Ying P’ien, where, e.g., it is said of the good 
man: “Let him correct himself and transform 
others. Let him pity the fatherless and show kind- 
ness to the widow, reverence the old and cherish 
the young. Let him sorrow over men’s ills, and re- 
joice over their good, help them in their straits, 
and save them in their perils. Let him look upon 
the blessings received by others as if they were 
his own, and upon the losses of others as if they 
were his own losses.”? And so on. 

The general attitude of the Taoist, however, 
was that of the mystic and the quietist, as illus- 
trated by the well-known sayings of the Tao Téh 
King: 

“Keep behind and you shall be put in front.” 
“He who is content has enough.” 
“Recompense injury with kindness.” 


“To the good I would be good. To the not good also I 
would be good in order to make them good.” 


Or we may recall the suggestive words of Chwang 
Tzu, one of the saintliest souls that ever lived be- 
neath a Chinese sky, a true precursor, on some 
sides, of S. Francis: 


“The command of armies is the lowest form of virtue. 
Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of educa- 
tion. Ceremonies and laws are the lowest form of govern- 
ment. Musie and fine clothes are the lowest form of 
happiness. Wailing and mourning are the lowest form of 


108 The Universal Faith 


grief. These five should follow the movements of the 
mind.” 


Yet, with all the unquestionable beauty which 
attaches to the writings and the lives of the first 
Taoist philosophers, Taoism has remained inef- 
fectual in the uplifting and saving of the land to 
which their witness was vouchsafed. The Way of 
Lao Tzu is not, afterall, a living Way. There is 
in it nought to bring out the cry of recognition: 
“A Face like my face that receives thee, a Man like to me 

Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever: a Hand like 


this hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee.” 


Life in its real fulness and genuine quality was 
so vaguely conceived that it is hardly to be won- 
dered at that subsequent generations of Taoists 
substituted for its quest the merely selfish search 
for a magical Philosopher’s Stone and an Elixir 
Vitae. 

Hence it came about that the system which 
promised most became worst, an instance of Cor- 
ruptio optimi pessima est. Taoism, instead of 
promoting spirituality, lent itself to the pseudo- 
magic and general charlatanry of present-day 
superstition. What might at least have been the 
complement and corrective of a mere moral phil- 
osophy degenerated into a mass of stupid futilities, 

Taoism too, though like its rival system it bore 
witness to the religious cravings of the Middle 
Kingdom, could not of itself supply the answer 
which the soul was waiting for. Like all the other 


The Gift of the East 109 


religions we have considered, like Judaism itself, 
it had to await the “fulness of time” for the 
Christ, through Whom alone the pilgrims on life’s 
way might find their final peace. 

A familiar Chinese legend tells that once upon 
a time the teachers of the San Chiao (The Three 
Religions), K’ung, Lao, and Fo (the Buddha) 
came down to earth to ascertain why it was that, 
in spite of all the splendid ethical content of their 
teachings, China still remained unregenerate. 
Reaching the earth, they proceeded to interrogate 
an elderly man who seemed likely to furnish the 
desired information. So they catechised him on 
the principles of their respective systems. Greatly, 
however, to their surprise, the old man, who 
turned out to be letter perfect in the Way of Vir- 
tue, the Classics, and the Sutras, confessed that 
all this knowledge was powerless to advance China 
along the way of goodness. “Sirs,” he said, “we 
are stone from the waist downwards; we can 
think and know, but we cannot act.” 

Such is the condition, not alone of China, but 
of the whole world till to the dispensation of the 
Law and the Prophets is added the dispensation 
of Grace. Then, although, as objects of supreme 
regard, Moses and Elijah, Confucius and Lao Tzu, 
and all the rest, disappear from sight, “Jesus is 
left alone,” the One for Whom the world has 
prayed, come at last, “not to destroy but to ful- 
Tih’? 

3. When we take up the study of the early his- 


110 The Unwersal Faith 


tory of Buddhism, we feel that here, more nearly 
than in any other of the world religions, until 
we come to Christianity itself, we find the Per- 
son of the Founder more important than the sys- 
tem, though it was the teaching rather than the 
teacher who was put forward as the means of 
man’s salvation. Gautama himself is the centrally 
attractive figure of Buddhism. No more humanly 
loveable character has appeared among the sons 
of men, none with more charm, more universal 
charity, none more pure or worthy of the creed 
he taught, none more resolute in his self-abnega- 
tion, none more strong to fight the wiles of Mara, 
the prince of evil, none more victoriously persis- 
tent to the last in the proclamation of the saving 
way. 

The accidental manner in which, through the 
popularity of the mediaeval romance, Barlaam 
and Josaphat, Gautama became a saint in the 
Christian calendar, though not without its irony, 
possesses the fullest justification, and would do 
so even had the canonization come about by delib- 
erate ecclesiastical action. Souls like Gautama 
are quite as much in place in the Church Calendar 
as were the souls of the pagans whom Dante ad- 
mitted to the spheres of Paradise. 

Further, the teaching of the Buddha turned in 
many ways in the direction of that Light which 
“coming into the world enlighteneth every man.” 

The sense of pity for all sentient things, de- 
veloped ultimately into the demand for the preach- 


The Gift of the East 111 


ing of sorrow’s cure, even “while a gnat cries,” 
_ had tremendous personal and social result in the 
caste-ridden India of the pre-Christian world and 
in the many lands to which the faith was borne. 
Indeed, its first success sprang rather from its 
social appeal than from any feature of its phil- 
osophy. It was the first religion to proclaim itself 
as universal, though without a fulness adequate 
for meeting the universal need. It “possessed a 
world-wide horizon and was committed to a world- 
wide dissemination.” There was no barrier which 
the love of the Buddha was not bold enough to 
break. He could eat with the gudra, converse with 
the courtesan, mingle alike with kings and beg- 
gars, even, through other existences, reach out to 
share the pains and supply the wants of the brute 
creation. The measureless compassion of the 
“Hight-fold Way” went far towards disguising the 
essential pessimism of the “Four Noble Truths.” 

Further still, although many foreign elements, 
including, doubtless, some which were Christian, 
came to increase the appeal which Buddhism made 
as a missionary religion, particularly in what is 
known as the Mahayana form, yet there is some- 
thing purposeful and organic in the development 
which marks its progress from India to the coun- 
tries of the Far East as a competing and con- 
quering system. 

So we see the atheism of Indian Buddhism 
transformed into polytheism, and, in the case of 
some of the Japanese sects, even into something 


112 The Universal Faith 


approaching monotheism. So, again, the soteriol- 
ogy of Indian Buddhism which made every man 
his own saviour,—the type called by the Japanese, 
jiriki (one’s own strength) is supplanted by the 
doctrine of salvation by trust in Amida,—the type 
known in Japan as tariki (another’s strength). 
Again, we see the blankness of a Nirvana prac- 
tically equivalent to non-existence gradually su- 
perseded by teaching as to a Western Paradise in 
which personal blessedness may be enjoyed. And, 
lastly, we see the Indian ideal of arhatship, in 
which the goal of each man’s endeavor is the 
speediest possible attainment of Nirvana, rejected 
for the ideal of Buddhahood, in which man’s aim 
is rather to benefit his fellows till the last of this 
world’s sorrows has been extinguished. 

In much of this there was to be discerned the 
following of a gleam which came less from the 
Way of Buddha than from the Way which was 
Christ. Sir Edwin Arnold was not far from the 
fact when he placed upon the lips of his Buddhist 
visitor to Galilee the words: 


“T do discern that, forth from this fair life 

And this meek Death and thine arisen Christ, 
Measureless things are wrought; a Thought-dawn born 
Which shall not cease to broaden, till its beam 

Makes noon of knowledge for a gathered world, 
Completing what our Buddha left unsaid; 

Carpeting bright his noble Hight-fold Way 

With fragrant blooms of all-renouncing love, 

And bringing high Nirvana nearer hope, 

Easier and plainer.” 


The Gift of the East ig | 


But there was more in pity, both human and di- 
vine, than it was possible for Gautama to discover 
for the remedying of the world’s ills, and in the 
eternal issue there was fuller content than was 
suggested by the negations of Nirvana. Buddhism, 
considered as a finality, was a failure. It was 
powerless to lift the individual above the insur- 
gent ills of life; it has proved powerless to de- 
liver the Orient from its social and political mis- 
eries. Only too obviously, in the grossness and 
superstition of modern China, one realizes how 
Buddhism has sunk into ready connivance with 
the charlatanry of a debased Taoism. Even in 
Japan, where Amidaism has striven to give to the 
idea of God and the idea of human personality a 
semblance of reality, the failure of the faith of 
Shaka is all too plain, and all too plain the effort 
to eke out its deficiencies by the borrowing from 
Christian method. 

Nor is it difficult to assign reasons for such a 
failure. The keynote of Buddhism, it has been 
said, is in the word Impermanence. God, under 
whatever name, even in polytheistic or apparently 
monolatrous forms of Buddhism, is Himself but 
a part of the great illusion. Amida, Maitreya, this 
one or that, all sink back ultimately into Maya; 
they fade away just when human hands most 
yearn to touch them. “Amida’s Paradise is indeed 
a very concrete heaven to the average believer. But 
as the believer grows in intelligence and begins to 
delve in the deeper teachings of his sect, his vision 


114 The Universal Faith 


of Paradise begins to fade. He learns that for 
‘practical’ purposes he should act and live as if 
the achievement of an enriched personality were 
the goal of all our strivings and the one value 
which abides the wreck of time, but in reality per- 
sonality and all individuality cannot be a perma- 
nent state.” The world is one like that described 
by Prospero: | 

“The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 

The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 

With all that it inhabit, shall dissolve, 


And like this unsubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a wrack behind.” 


Hence the cure of sorrow, except to those who 
have taken despair to themselves as a bride, must 
be illusory too. As in the familiar story of the 
woman and the millet seed, Buddhism has no com- 
fort to give except in saying that “loss is common 
to the race,” that misery is inseparable from life. 

No wonder we find that, at its very best, Bud- 
dhism is tinged with ineffaceable sadness, the sad- 
ness of those who panted for life, yet were of- 
fered consolation only in the abnegation of life; 
of those who craved for peace, but were offered 
peace only in the dreamless sleep of Nirvana. As 
it has been put by a non-Christian Chinese writer, 
quoted by Soothill, “Buddhism abandons the 
world; Christianity would redeem it.” 

Surely the Prince Siddhartha, had he lived in 
Galilee instead of India, and had been able to 
share the lot of Jesus of Nazareth rather than 


The Gift of the East 115 


that of the ascetics of Benares, would not have 
needed to flee to bleak negations as a refuge from 
the world’s sorrow, but, hearing the words, “Come 
unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest,” would have followed in 
the way and so learned to exhaust pessimism at 
its very source. 

4. The last of the world’s great religious sys- 
tems upon which we must touch is that strange 
medley of elements, the creed of over two hundred 
millions of the human race, which we call Hindu- 
ism. 

The difficulty of dealing with such a system as 
briefly as is here necessary is enhanced by the fact 
that the term Hinduism has been used as a kind 
of rag-bag made to hold all kinds of things from 
the grossest forms of devil-worship to the loftiest 
speculations of the Upanishads. Another difficulty 
arises from the unknown extent and degree to 
which Hinduism, like other Eastern religions, is 
to-day indebted to the religions of the West. 

Nevertheless, we may note a certain continuity 
and consistency which manifest a true evolution 
of a particular type, and furnish us with one more 
Old Testament requiring the New Testament of 
the Christian revelation. 

In the early Vedic days, illustrated in the splen- 
did hymns which form our first Aryan literature, 
we have the simple and sincere religion of those 
who recognized divine forces in the phenomena 
of Nature. With their storm gods and their fire 


116 The Universal Faith 


gods, the Vedic Aryans became polytheists, and 
yet very nearly also monotheists, as we may see 
from the hymns to Varuna and the very striking 
poem addressed to the Unknown God. But, in- 
stead of treading, as did the Jew, the way to 
monotheism, they took the other path which, re- 
solving all the nature gods into one, became pan- 
theism. In this pantheism all was turned into 
deity to the destruction of deity itself. Tout était 
Dieu excepté Dieu méme. To see God in Nature is, 
of course, a necessary element of religion, an ele- 
ment largely recovered for us, by the way, through 
modern science, after the desolating deism of the 
18th century. The language of Tennyson is as true 
to one aspect of Christian theology as it is to the 
thought of Lucretius: 


“The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, the 
plains, 

Are not these, O soul, the vision of Him who reigns? 

Is not the vision he, tho’ he be not that which he seems? 

Dreams are true while they last, and do not we live in 
dreams? 

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, 

Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from him? 

Speak to him, then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit 
can meet: 

Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and 
feet. 

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man 
cannot see; 

But if we could see and hear this vision, were it not 
he?” 


But, unfortunately, religion in India was un- 


The Gift of the East 117 


able to synthesize the various elements which 
. would have made her witness to this particular 
truth effective. There was a sense of God’s im- 
manence which, dispensing with the complement- 
ary fact of His transcendence, in the course of 
time made His very existence little but a dream. 
There was a devotion to works of the ritualistic 
sort which made Karma Kanda, as it was called, 
a mere wearisome round of ceremonial obser- 
vances without any moral or religious value. 
There was the reaction from this to what was 
termed Jnana Kanda, the religion of knowledge 
which tempted speculation into an atmosphere 
ever more tenuous, until intellect committed sui- 
cide in the effort to feed upon its own illusions. 
There followed again the experiment of bhakti, 
or devotion, a devotion to deities whose existence 
was assumed to deceive the starving emotions of 
men. 

Hence the evils of a religion, conceived not com- 
prehensively but departmentally, entered to rob 
India of many of those fruits of faith which her 
genuine interest in religion seemed to demand and 
deserve. 

Much indeed in the long story of Indian relig- 
ion, as a story covering the experience of a thou- 
sand years before the rise of Buddhism, and that 
of over a thousand years since Buddhism ceased 
to be an Indian religion, belongs to the same prep- 
aration for the revelation of Christ which we re- 
gard as the explanation of Judaism. 


118 The Universal Faith 


There was the constant emphasis on the appli- 
cability of religion to every detail of human life, 
without distinction between the sacred and the 
secular. 

There was the more or less continuously spiri- 
tual attitude which bore fruit from age to age in 
religious reformations, from the days of the an- 
cient Rishis to the days of Kabir and Nanak, of 
Ramanuja and Ramananda, and so on to the the- 
istic movements of our own day. 

There is the witness of saintly devotion in much 
of the religious literature of India, which, despite 
its occasional childishness, has bequeathed to the 
world the treasures of the Upanishads and the 
Bhagavadgita. 

There is the constant witness to the supremacy 
of the divine, in comparison with which all things 
are maya, or illusion. 

There is the witness to the will of that Divine 
Absolute to manifest itself to men, so that the 
movements of God towards the world, called Ava- 
tars, become great redemptive acts, affording con- 
solation for the present and hope for the future. 
The humility of Arjuna’s prostration before the 
splendid revelation of Krishna cannot fail to pre- 
pare the souls of men for the more marvellous 
manifestation of God in Christ. 

In all this God has not left Himself without 
witness, but it is a witness which is continually 
urging on the still unsatisfied spirit to the 
expectation of clearer light and completer 


The Gift of the East 119 


knowledge than any Hindu scripture could 
afford. 

With Indian theology vitiated by that same 
sense of impermanence which hangs over the wit- 
ness of Buddhism, with the moral vision of God 
faint in the very effort to make it bright, we feel 
that no revelation of Deity, even should we, as 
some have suggested, fit the Christ in a Hindu 
niche as the tenth avatar of Vishnu, comes to us 
with a sense of supreme reality. Gods and men, 
angels and demons, all alike fade away into the 
background of cloud which is the final word of 
India with respect to all things upon which men 
have set their affections. 

Furthermore, without that personal devotion 
to the real, the true, the “genuine” God, Whom the 
Christian apostle contrasts with the “shadows” 
(1 S. John vy. 21), there can be no satisfactorily 
ethical or rational or emotional religion, such as 
delivers us from the barren business of ritual, the 
vapid speculations of the philosophers, or the tan- 
tric excesses and immoral license of Cakti. 

Many indeed are the saints of India who by a 
true faith have risen to the seeing and the doing 
of noble and inspiring things. The fruits of a 
truly Christian faith find their harvest in the 
lives of men like Tagore and Gandhi, and many 
another, who profess not the name of Jesus with 
their lips. 

But for the salvation of India, as Dr. Farquhar 
has said: 


120 The Universal Faith 


“A new religion must be found, a religion which will 
provide a religious foundation for the wider and truer 
ideas which now dominate the Hindu mind; satisfy the 
religious instincts of the people, and stimulate them to 
purity, progress, and strength. Christianity is unques- 
tionably the source of the new explosive thought which 
is recreating the Indian character and intellect to-day. 
There is no other religion which contains these master 
ideas. Only in the riches of Christianity,—Christ and 
His Cross, the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of 
Man, and the Kingdom of God—can Hindus find the uni- 
versal principles needed for a new intellectual, moral, 
and social life.” 


Here is the fulfilment of Akbar’s Dream, en- 
trance into the universal faith, which is indeed 
“open-doored to every breath from Heaven.” 

“T can never forget,” writes Tagore, “that scrap 
of a song I once heard in the early dawn in the 
midst of the din of the crowd that had collected 
for a festival the night before, ‘Ferryman, take 
me across to the other shore.’ The poet proceeds 
to speak of that other shore, beyond our striving 
and our toil, the shore for which all human hearts 
are yearning. Surely it is a prayer which we feel 
rising through all the beliefs and forms of these 
Eastern religions. Surely it is a prayer which we 
feel Christ alone has the power to answer. “For 
here rolls the sea, and even here lies the other 
shore waiting to be reached,—yes, here is this 
everlasting present, not distant, not anywhere 
else.” 


CHAPTER VI 


CHRIST THE ANSWER 


“In Him of Whom the sibyl told, 

For Whom the prophet’s harp was toned, 
Whose need the sage and magian owned, 
The loving heart of God behold, 


“The world sits at the feet of Christ, 
Unknowing, blind, and unconsoled ; 

It yet shall touch His garment’s fold, 

And feel the heavenly Alchemist 
Transform its very dust to gold.”—Whittier. 


SYNOPSIS 


“The desirable things of the nations’—survey of pre- 
vious chapters—“waiting for the consolation of Israel” 
—the substance of the expectation—the Messianic hope 
—the sense of sin—Does the fulfilment correspond with 
the magnitude of the hope?—‘‘What think ye of Christ?” 
—no figment of the imagination—the documents and their 
use—‘‘the Quis, the Qualis, the Quantus”’ of Jesus. 

The differences between Christ and other teachers— 
the self-witness of Jesus—revealer and embodiment of 
a new method—the place of the Cross—the vital union 
of Christ and believer—the sacramental side—Chris- 
tianity and the Mystery cults—Christ an “expression 
point” in evolution. 


121 


122 The Universal Faith 


The witness of Christ to God—to His humanness—to 
His immanence—to His transcendence—how Christ be- 
comes the revelation of God to all men. 

The witness of Christ to Man—the perfection of the 
individual life—the need of immortality—the need of 
the Kingdom—the metaphor of the Family and the Tree 
—glimpses of the Absolute in Christ—the inspiration of 
the Christ—the victory of “the Lonely Man.” 


N one of the most familiar passages of Hebrew 
prophecy, the prophet Haggai, seeking to 
hearten the disillusioned and discouraged Jews 
who had returned from Babylon to take up the 
rebuilding of their devastated city and desecrated 
shrine, uttered the startling prediction that the 
edifice as to whose future they took so gloomy a 
view would become more glorious than anything 
which had preceded it. Moreover, the prophet gave 
the reason for his optimism. Here, he said, would 
be revealed “the desirable things of the nations.” 
There could be only one intelligible and satis- 
factory fulfilment of these prophetic words, 
though other fulfilments have been here and there 
timidly suggested. It is to this fulfilment that we 
shall direct our thoughts in the present chapter. 
We have sketched, with necessary haste and in- 
completeness, the gradual emergence, in what we 
term primitive religion, of some of those appetites 
and longings, often crudely, savagely, sensually, 
even obscenely, expressed, for the things which 
represented the heart’s desire of the ancient world. 
We have seen, again, how these things were 


Christ the Answer 123 


taken up into the religion of the Jew, and there 
refined, interpreted, restated. 

We have seen the stream of Jewish witness rein- 
forced by all those tributary streams which flowed 
into it from the religions of the nations with 
whom the history of the Jew was blended, and 
still further enlarged out of the emotions and ex- 
periences of the human heart expressed in the re- 
ligions of the outside world. 

Now we take our stand at that point where 
Judaism, passing the experience of the nations 
through the crucible of its own religious history, 
is enabled, as God’s priest, to make the offering 
of all to the long expected Messiah, in order that 
He may Himself bring to the desire of the world 
an answer such as no religious system had ever 
dreamed possible of realization. 

With the elect “remnant” of God’s people, with 
men like Simeon and women like Anna, waiting 
“for the consolation of Israel,” was waiting all 
the world beside. As the Jewish priests stood upon 
the temple platform, watching for the first glint 
of the rising sun, when the silver trumpets would 
give forth the signal for the morning sacrifice, so 
watching, “more than watchmen wait for the 
morning,” waited the expectant world— 


“Upon the world’s great altar stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God.” 


As the multitude outside the temple court on 
the Day of Atonement waited for the sound of the 


124 The Universal Faith 


bells which announced the coming forth of the 
High Priest to bless, so men waited everywhere, 
hopeful and tense, for the appearance of that 
“Day of the Lord” which was to be the day of 
the world’s redemption. 

But the fulfilment of human hope involves some- 
thing more than the granting to men the mere let- 
ter of their expectation. It must correspond with 
something as deep as the most unfelt of their 
needs, needs divinely seen, yet as yet well nigh un- 
intelligible to human minds and inexpressible in 
human language. It must give more than man may 
ask or think, yet must at the same time speak 
articulately even to the understanding of the 
child. 

What, briefly, must the substance of such an ex- 
pectation be? 

First, it must be the full revelation of God, as 
one associated with all the processes of life, and 
yet transcending all that tribal and national the- 
ologies had been able to suggest. 

Secondly, it must be the full revelation of the 
meaning of life, in both its individual and cor- 
porate aspects, keeping in view both a temporal 
and an eternal significance, climbing up from its 
lowest manifestations, yet claiming a union with 
the Divine to which the marriage metaphor of 
the prophets of Judaism was as inadequate as 
that transcended the physical symbols of the older 
paganism. 

Thirdly, it must represent adequately the es- 


Christ the Answer 125 


tablished linking of the Divine and the human, 
as prophetic of the final perfection of Creation, in 
the full revelation of One Who is at once Divine 
and Human, the revelation of God, the firstfruits 
of creation, the Lord of a Society which is at once 
the true kingdom of Israel and the rallying-point 
for a redeemed universe, One Who is at once King, 
Prophet, Priest, Sacrificial Victim, Sacrificial 
Feast, the Way to Life, and the Source of Life in 
one. 

It may be noticed that in all that has hitherto 
been said of the preparation of the world for 
Christ, little has been said of the developing sense 
of sin. The reason for this will be apparent when 
we reflect that the sense of sin is the obverse of a 
gradually enlarging conception of God. The se- 
quence of the three prayers spoken of in a familiar 
story,—“Lord, show me myself,” “Lord, show me 
Thyself,’ “Lord, make me like Thyself,’—is 
wrong. We do not find God by realizing our own 
sinfulness, but rather we realize our sinfulness 
just in proportion as we become conscious of the 
holiness of God. It was Isaiah’s vision of Yahweh 
which compelled the cry, “I am a man of unclean 
lips”; it was S. Peter’s new vision of the Saviour 
on the Lake of Galilee which forced from him the 
confession, “Depart from me; I am a sinful man, 
O Lord.” 

Consequently, we have assumed throughout that 
as men caught glimpses, however faint, of the 
character and being of God, it would fill their re- 


126 The Universal Faith 


ligious literature with confessions of sin, prayers 
of penitence, and pleas for absolution. 

It is for us to ask in the present chapter how 
far we may honestly expect the world to recognize 
in the Christ of the New Testament the fulfilment 
of what we have gathered up as the substance of 
the expression, “the desirable things of the na- 
tions.” 

Is the magnitude of the fulfilment offered in 
the Person and work of Christ correspondent with 
the magnitude of the desire expressed? Is Christ 
the answer honestly and adequately vouchsafed ? 

The figure of Christ as given in the composite 
picture afforded by the Epistles and Gospels (the 
Epistles, the reader should be reminded, no less 
than the Gospels) is plainly no figment of the 
imagination. Unless we are prepared to deal dis- 
honestly with “the documents in the case” and 
put them aside merely because they conflict with 
preconceived theories of our own, we must use 
them just as we would use any other documents 
which we desired conscientiously to treat as ma- 
terials for historical investigation. 

Putting aside all that may be explained by the 
literary methods or intellectual limitations of the 
age, we find, in spite of the varied authorship of 
the New Testament books, an impressively har- 
monious unity. We discover that the picture has 
not, after all, as we may have been informed, been 
blurred for us by ages of elaborate Christological 
theorising, nor have we been hypnotized through 


Christ the Answer 127 


ecclesiastical conventions into the acceptance of 
a portrait which is inconsistent with the Christ of 
the first Christian writings. The pendulum of 
Christian opinion, in answer to the question, 
“What think ye of Christ?” may have swung from 
one extreme to another, suggesting to one age a 
Jesus all mildness and passivity, to another one 
fiery and imperious, compact of strength and over- 
flowing with scornful indignation. Gilbert Ches- 
terton has spoken scathingly of those who tear 
into “silly strips” the soul of Jesus to make Him 
at once responsible for the pacificism of Edward 
the Confessor and the military passion of Richard 
Coeur de Lion. But such errors mark the limita- 
tions of the beholder, not the defect of the Christ 
as suggested by the New Testament record. 

The Gospels (and Epistles) furnish us with 
no abstraction of theological schematism, no 
imagination of flabby pietism, no grotesque pic- 
ture of an Oriental magician such as is preferred 
in the Apocryphal Gospels. Rather are we enabled 
to see, with Luther, the Qwis, the Qualis, the 
Quantus, of One Who reveals to us what, after all, 
no “flower in the crannied wall” is able to give, 
namely, “all that God and Man is.” 

Before speaking specifically of certain funda- 
mental things in this double revelation, let us 
note certain differences, in their own way as fun- 
damental, between Christ and the Founders of 
other religious systems. 

i. Christ is His own witness to Himself. Other 


128 The Universal Faith 


teachers point away from themselves to announce 
a Way or a doctrine concerning which they claim 
no more than that they are its appointed heralds, 
or, at most, through the revelation of God, its dis- 
coverers. Christ is Himself the Teacher and the 
Truth, the Physician and the Medicine, the Guide 
and the Way, the Life and the Life-giver. That 
reiteration of the “I,” which in the case of others 
would repel by its egoism, in His case assures us 
by virtue of its authority. Had He been Teacher 
alone, or Example alone, Christianity might have 
turned out to be a philosophy or a system of 
ethics. Seeing that He is the Life, true religion 
must be from henceforth nothing less than sacra- 
mental union with God through participation in 
the life of Christ set free for the believer. 

ii, Christ is at once the revealer and the em- 
bodiment of a new method,—old indeed as Crea- 
tion itself, since to create is to be crucified, and to 
be created is also to be crucified, but startlingly 
new when enunciated as a Gospel rather than as 
a Curse,—the method of the Cross. Infinite harm 
has been done to the ideals of religion by making 
the Cross only an incident in the story of Christ, 
instead of being the motive power of the Incarna- 
tion itself, the climax of all the epiphanies pre- 
sented to the eyes of men, the permanent glory 
which makes “the Lamb slain before the founda- 
tion of the world” the centre of the Universe and 
worshipful to all eternity. Perhaps much of the 
blame for an error which has even colored men’s 


Christ the Answer 129 


thoughts of heaven as an escape from the way of 
the Cross, tolerated here more or less patiently, 
into a blessedness not essentially different from 
the gilded ease that the worldling prefers to an- 
ticipate on earth, may be traced to the mistransla- 
tion of a single verse in 8S. Paul’s Epistle to the 
Philippians (ii 6-7). When the apostle says, “Let 
this mind be in you which was also in Christ 
Jesus,” he does not follow up the injunction by 
describing Jesus as emptying Himself of His 
glory or His Godhead in order to take upon Him- 
self the servant’s form, humbling Himself to the 
death of the Cross. Rather does he assert that 
His very equality with God made all this possible, 
since God too lives by “emptying Himself,” pour- 
ing out His love “like the rush of a river.” So the 
passage, properly translated, runs: “Let this mind 
be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, Who, 
being in the form of God, did not deem His being 
equal with God a means of grasping things, but 
(on the contrary) emptied Himself, taking the 
form of a servant.” 

Without the correction of this popular error, 
Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, remains 
obscure, the method of Christ’s earthly ministry 
a contradiction to His essential being, and that 
essential being a mockery rather than a support 
to those who suffer. 

Deliberately putting aside those well-worn 
philosophies of life which others had proposed, 
Jesus espoused confidently and with joy the way 


130 The Universal Faith 


of the Cross as the Divine principle which had 
operated from the beginning for the uplifting of 
Creation all the way from Chaos to the divinely 
purposed Cosmos. Confronted at the beginning of 
the ministry with the temptation to accept “the 
satanism of time” as determining the Messianic 
policy, to gain the homage of men by feeding them 
with earthly bread, to attract the faith of the 
world by dazzling feats, such as leaping from the 
temple roof, to establish the kingdom by some 
political tour de force such as the Time-spirit 
made all too possible,—He chose rather to offer 
the food for which the human spirit was really 
anhungered, to accept for Himself and His dis- 
ciples the long, slow way of sacrificial love, to 
trust the kingdom to the divine intuition which 
proclaims, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
unto Me.” 

iii. Thus proclaiming Himself the Life, and 
thus making that Life available to all by sacra- 
mental union with Himself, even as the harvest 
grain partakes of the nature of the seed-corn 
whence it sprung, Christ makes of His Church 
something different from any assemblage of be- 
lievers that had ever before gathered around a 
religious teacher. It was a relation which had 
indeed been symbolized, both in the mystery cults 
of Greece and the sacrificial system of many other 
lands, but it had never hitherto been made an 
element in universal religion. Men had been buried 
and brought forth from burial to symbolize the 


Christ the Answer 13] 


new religious birth; they had been taken by gross 
pantomime through the process of that new birth; 
to add force to the symbolism, they had been 
taught anew the first syllables of language, as 
though they had been verily and indeed new-born 
babies. Men had been placed physically in the still 
warm carcasses of the accepted sacrifice, or, for 
the same reason, passed between the pieces, in 
order to show how closely they were identified 
with the life which sacrificially had been lifted 
up to God. But all these were symbols only of the 
facts which Christ made basal in the new birth 
of Baptism or in the feeding of hungry souls with 
Eucharistic food in the feast wherein Christ was 
at once Priest and Victim. 

These differences must be regarded as proofs 
of that uniqueness which justifies the recognition 
in Jesus Christ of one of those biological “expres- 
sion points” which, like the blossoming time of 
a flower for which all the winter and the spring 
have been preparing, appear here and there in 
the story of evolution to mark the milestones 
along the way of the spirit. For, as a distinguished 
writer on Evolution has said: “In evolution a 
goal is not only a completion of one stage, but also 
the beginning of another and higher stage,—on 
a higher plane of life with new and higher ca- 
pacities and powers unimaginable from any lower 
plane.” (Le Conte, Hvolution and Religion, p. 
361.) 

Let us analyse as simply as we may that “Faith- 


132 The Universal Faith 


ful and True Witness” by which, as by a magnet 
men are gradually being drawn together into the 
society which is to be the Universal Church. 

1. Christ satisfies the desire of men to look 
upon the face of God,—“the very God, think, Abib, 
only think.” Of course, this is a revelation which 
has in it no suggestion of intellectual definition 
or philosophic finality. It is still true, after the 
witness of Christ, as before it, that— 

“Under the vertical sun the exposed brain, 
And lidless eye and disemprisoned heart 


Less certainly would wither up at once 
Than mind, confronted with the truth of Him.” 


Christ, as the revelation of God, is still the Way, 
the Way especially suited for human feet to tread. 
So the threefold manner in which the revelation 
comes is exactly what is needed. 

i. First, God is revealed by Christ in His Hu- 
manness. The anthropomorphic terminology which 
we must necessarily employ in speaking of God, 
and the necessary anthropomorphism of our very 
conceptions of God, are not merely concessions 
to human limitations, but the assertion of this 
essential humanness which is implicit in the na- 
ture of God. God does, in very fact, touch human- 
ity through the Incarnation, that Incarnation 
which is not a mere device to remedy a broken 
plan, but of the essence of the Gospel of Creation 
itself. 

ii. Secondly, God is revealed by Christ in His 
Immanence. Men have desired to see God in Na- 


Christ the Answer 133 


ture, in all the ways suggested by the poets from 
the Vedas down to Shelley and Wordsworth and 
Tennyson, and later. Christ must give us the God 
desired of Christopher Morley: 

“The God from whom 

No thought, no mind, can ever be shut out, 

The God of gales and gravity, 

The God of honorable doubt. 

God of the odorous Eskimo 

Under the flickering Arctic glow. 

God of the Kootenai forest spires 

(I’ve seen them on a postal card) 

God of the dog that never tires 

Of looking hopefully at his master.” 


All creation is eloquent of the divine purpose, 
but there is needed a Christ to interpret. “Earth’s 
crammed with Heaven,” but the Christ must give 
the vision. Matter, as well as spirit, is the sphere 
of the divine working, but only the miracle of the 
Incarnation gives faith its proper foothold. Christ 
makes every groan of creation a lifting up of life 
towards the victory of the Cross. 

iii, But lest man should think of God as real 
only to the euhemerist and the pantheist, re- 
vealed upon the summit peaks of humanity and 
in the processes of Nature, Christ reveals Him 
also as Transcendent. He is supramundane and 
extramundane, yet to be named in that name of 
names, which is the parable of all that brings 
God nearest to the heart,—Father. Men sometimes 
speak glibly of the doctrine of the Fatherhood of 
God, as though it were a doctrine obvious and 


134 The Universal Faith 


undogmatic. The truth is, that, far from being an 
easy creed, it would be well-nigh an impossible 
creed had not Christ vindicated for us its validity. 
It is not merely that ‘He envisages life as the be- 
ing about a “Father’s business,” or that He 
teaches men to pray, “Our Father, which art in 
Heaven”; it is especially that on the Cross, when 
the faith of most men in God’s Fatherhood breaks 
down most conspicuously, sometimes even with 
blasphemy, His faith is to the last unclouded and 
serene. “Father, into Thy hands I commend My 
spirit.” 

Thus, all men, from whatever angle of experi- 
ence they may view their life, are enabled to at- 
tain to God through Christ. The child may quiet 
its nightly fear of the dark with the simple 
prayer: 

“Jesu, tender Shepherd, hear me, 
Bless Thy little lamb to-night” ; 


the young man realizes His ideal of “the Happy 
Warrior” out of a sense of being companioned by 
Him “Who for the joy that was set before Him” 
went stedfastly on to Jerusalem; even the haughty 
and disillusioned Queen, in the play, may clasp 
God to her heart in the proud, pathetic cry: 


“I’m head of the Church 
And stoop my neck on Sunday—to what Christ? 
The God of little children? I have none. 
The God of love? What love has come to me? 
The God upon the ass? I am not meek, 
Nor is he meek, the stallion that I ride, 


Christ the Answer 135 


The great white horse of England. I’ll not bow 
To the gentle Jesus of the women, I— 

But to the Man Who hung ‘twixt earth and heaven 
Six mortal hours, and knew the end (as strength 
And custom was) three days away, yet ruled 
His soul and body so, that when the sponge 
Bless’d the crack’d lips with promise of relief 
And quick oblivion, He would not drink: 

He turn’d His head away, and would not drink: 
Spat out the anodyne, and would not drink. 
This was a God for kings and queens of pride, 
And Him I follow.’ 


So, in the words of Richard Watson Gilder, 
put upon the lips of a Galilean of Christ’s own 
day, 

“Tf Jesus Christ is a God,— 
And the only God,—I swear 


I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, and the sea, and the air.” 


2. And the converse is equally true: 


“If Jesus Christ is a man,— 

And only a man,—I say 

That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
And to Him will I cleave alway.” 


For Christ satisfies also all that men have de- 
sired to see realized in Man. All creation is full 
of the Divine Presence, but the Presence shows 
through most resplendently at creation’s topmost 
peak. Anatomically akin to the ape, disgusting 
and degradable to a point in reference to which a 
philosopher may speak of man as “the ugliest of 
idols,” and another describe the race as “mostly 


136 The Universal Faith 


fools,” man has yet dreams of a godlike destiny 
for the species. He is “noble in reason,” “infinite 
in faculty,” “in action how like an angel, in ap- 
prehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, 
the paragon of animals.” He is Nature’s last 
handiwork, “such splendid purpose in his eyes,” 
“the consummation of this scheme of being, the 
completion of this sphere of life: whose attributes 
had here and there been scattered o’er the visible 
world before asking to be combined, dim frag- 
ments meant to be united in some wondrous 
whole.” All this is vindicated before the eyes of 
men in Christ, thus redeeming all heredity back 
to the remotest, and making the least and lowest 
“kin to the highest and partner to the best.” 

Moreover, as we saw the perfection of the Di- 
vine revealed by Christ along three several lines, 
so along three lines we see the completeness of 
the human. 

i. Christ displays the perfection of the individ- 
ual life. It is a life unfolding, under no extraordi- 
nary conditions of place, or time, or circumstance, 
but unfolding naturally in each successive human 
stage, a continuous epiphany of filial obedience, 
neighborly kindness and consideration, human 
helpfulness, all recommended by that “sweet, at- 
tractive kind of grace” which made humanity in 
Him “beautiful” (kalos) as well as “good” 
(agathos). A life, moreover, not merely in the 
negative sense free from sin, but positively an 
exemplification of graces and virtues so com- 


Christ the Answer 137 


pletely harmonized as sometimes to need the anal- 
ysis which reduces the sunbeam to its several 
colors in order that we may appreciate the beauty 
and perfection of each. All, once again, trans- 
figured by the love of man and the love of God, 
the perfect fulfilment of the law, the love which 
prevents the purity from seeming cold, or the 
meekness from seeming weak, the strength from 
seeming harsh, the holiness from seeming unsym- 
pathetic with failure. Thus comes to us, with a 
supreme sense of conviction, the revelation of one 
individual life whose obedience may fitly be 
summed up in the dying words: “It is finished.” 

ii, It is a revelation of human nature such as 
makes obvious demand for a larger arena of experi- 
ence than is provided on the earthly stage. Jesus 
says little in the way of formal statement as to the 
doctrine of a future life, or as to the immortality 
of the soul. But His message and the relation es- 
tablished between Himself and the disciple makes 
the doctrine of immortality plainly necessary, 
since the conviction of the worthfulness of life 
here and now gives justification to the desire for 
its continuance. As Robert Louis Stevenson has 
said: “To believe in immortality is one thing, but 
first of all it is needful that we believe in life.” 
In an age when men were beginning to crave for 
Lethe and Nepenthe out of despair over “the 
weary weight of this unintelligible world,” Jesus, 
“the Resurrection and the Life,” so raised the 
evaluation of life as consisting in the knowledge 


138 The Universal Faith 


of and the communion with God, the Father of 
all, that it became henceforth unthinkable to be- 
lievers that faculties awakened into being should 
not be granted their fulfilment in the use of “the 
full-grown energies of heaven.” Life conceived, not 
as mere endlessness, but as value to be conserved, 
shared, moreover, with God Himself, could not 
fail to carry its gains unspilled through the ex- 
perience which, proved to be no curse, had become 
revealed as God’s chosen method for lifting life 
from the natural to the spiritual. 

iii. It is a revelation of human nature in which 
the trained faculty of the individual is seen only 
to have its proper sphere in that service of God 
and man which constitutes the atmosphere of the 
Kingdom which is both the kingdom of God and 
the kingdom of Man. Many have been the experi- 
ments made by man for the building up of a per- 
fect society. It was the goal sought of man’s spirit 
from the day that the gates of Eden closed behind 
him. It prompted the building of every city, from 
Babel of old to the London and New York of to- 
day. It was the better side of that megalomania 
which leads American cities to pad the reports of 
their decennial census. It prompted the literature 
of visionary republics from Plato’s day to the pres- 
ent. But whereas Empires fall to pieces of their 
own weight, because of a cohesion sought through 
the application of external force, the “Kingdom out 
of the Heavens” is set forth as the Humanity de- 
sired by Christ because it is the regnancy of di- 


Christ the Answer 139 


vine principles such as have their authority from 
within, the authority which moulds by forces 
which are felt only as the fruit tree feels the ris- 
ing of the sap. 

That is why the two metaphors most used by 
Christ Himself to describe the society of the re- 
deemed are, first, that of the Family, and secondly, 
that of the 7'ree. In the tree the fruit-bearing is 
the result of grace at work within; in the Family 
the law which binds together is the law of love, 
as distinguished from the servile order which 
makes efficiency alone its goal. 

It is not strange that men have never been 
able to conceive of a higher ideal, or indeed even 
to reach the heights which have been thus re- 
vealed. 

“It is true,” writes Professor Le Conte, “that in many 
ways we have advanced and are still advancing by the 
use of partial ideals; but this use of partial and relative 
ideals is itself only a temporary stage of evolution. At a 
certain stage we catch glimpses of the absolute moral 
ideals. Then our gaze becomes fixed, and we are thence- 
forward drawn upward forever. The human race has 
already reached a point where the absolute ideal of 


character is attractive. This Divine ideal can never again 
be lost to humanity.” 


To a world which had already well nigh ceased 
to believe in virtue, the vision came as a life-giv- 
ing thing. To those who had begun to cry out for 
long and dreamless sleep in death since life was 
forever sinking back after effort into moral and 
spiritual failure, and since every city which had 


140 The Universal Faith 


been built up in faith and hope had become as 
Babylon, a “black nest of rats,” it came indeed as 
the vision of a city arrayed in light descending 
out of an open heaven. 

Even at the hour when all was blackest, those 
who represented the world’s hope, even though it 
were at the Cross, found strength and solace. The 
scum of the Roman barracks who nailed the 
Saviour to the Cross heard from His lips a prayer 
for their pardon addressed to a Father in the 
heavens; the dying bandit opened his eyes, glazed 
in death, upon a Kingdom, and received the assur- 
ance of a rest in Paradise; the Roman centurion 
beheld in the expiring sufferer One who was 
righteousness incarnate; the scattered and the 
homeless began to find assurance of a love which 
gave the words “Son” and “Mother” a deeper 
meaning than the world had hitherto known. 

That vision, we hope to show, has not lost its 
force in the passing of the years. The picture we 
ourselves form of Christ may break up again and 
again, but we shall ever find it true— 


“That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Becomes my universe that feels and knows.” 


And wherever the “Lonely Man” stands lifted up 
for the contemplation of mankind, the soul that 
pauses to behold Him must at last yield Him the 
homage of the heart and all that the heart con- 
tains: 


Christ the Answer 141 


“It is hearts of men You want.— 

Not greed and carven tombs, not misers’ candles; . . 
Look, Lonely Man! You shall have all of us 

To wander the world over, where You stand 

At all the crossways, and on lonely hills,— 
Outside the churches, where the lost ones go!— 
And the wayfaring men, and thieves, and wolves, 
And lonely creatures, and the ones that sing; 

We will show all men what we hear and see; 

And we will make Thee lift Thy head and smile.” 


CHAPTER VII 


THE CHRIST OF HISTORY 


“A Person came and lived and loved and did and 
taught and died and rose again and lives on by His power 
and His spirit forever within us and amongst us, so un- 
speakably rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so 
homely, so divinely above us precisely in being so di- 
vinely near, that His character and teaching require, 
for an ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the 
varying study and different experiments and applica- 
tions, embodiments and unrollings, of all the races of 
civilizations, of all the individual and corporate, the 
simultaneous and successive, experiences of the human 
race to the end of time.”—The Baron Friedrich von 
Hiigel. 


SYNOPSIS 


Is the answer of Christ explicit in history ?—King 
Cole—promise and performance—verdict of hostile 
critics—verdict of the disappointed—Christ in Hades 
—certain elements of hope properly to be disappointed 
—error as to the character of the Kingdom—and the 
speed of its coming—no disappointment to the true dis- 
ciple. 

Survey of the Gesta Christi—how men have seen God 
in Jesus Christ—‘“the fulness of Him that filleth all in 
all”—‘“the acknowledgment of God in Christ’”—Christ as 
the revelation of life—the “Christ-like” life—the pil- 
grimage of souls—Christ the source of social reform— 


142 


The Christ of History 143 


The Light of the World—the story of civilization the 
story of Christian progress—how democracy becomes 
possible—the story of intellectual advance—the story of 
the outreaching love of God—‘“the leaves of the tree’— 
a Temple of Hell—‘“‘patriotism is not enough’—the City 
of God—access to the Tree of Life and the Water of Life. 


OW has the answer which, as we saw in our 

last chapter, was implicit in the Christ of 

the Gospels, become explicit in History? This 
must be the subject of the present chapter. 

In a recent poem of John Masefield’s, we are in- 
troduced to King Cole, the spirit of hope and op- 
timism, who comes to the poor, broken-down cir- 
cus man, piloting his vans through the rain and 
mire on his way to the next stand. The visitor by 
his magic transforms the doleful procession into 
a pageant of life and beauty: 


“And all the vans seemed grown with living leaves 
And living flowers, the last September knows, 
Moist poppies scarlet from the Helcote sheaves, 
Green-fingered bine that runs the barley rows, 
Pale candy-lips and those intense blue blows 
That trail the porches in the autumn dusk, 
Tempting the noiseless moth to tongue their musk. 
So tired thus, so tended and so sung, 

They crossed the city through the unwieldy crowd. 
Maids with wide eyes from upper windows hung, 
The children waved their toys and sang aloud.” 


Yet with all this wonder and beauty viewed from 
without, the circus man sat alone by himself in 
his van disconsolate, seeing nothing of the splen- 
dor: 


144 The Universal Faith 


“But in his van the beaten showman bowed 
His head upon his hands, and wept, not knowing 
Aught of what passed except that wind was blowing.” 


How far has the procession of the Church of 
Christ through history, seen from within or from 
without, resembled what the crowd saw or what 
was in the mind of the “beaten showman”? Is 
there a spirit, no creation of the excited imagina- 
tion, but the very Spirit of God, which may come, 
like King Cole, to make us see things as they 
really are? 

There can be little or no doubt as to the nature 
of the demand made by humanity from the be- 
ginning. There can be as little doubt as to the 
claim made by Christ and His disciples that it 
was within His power and will to satisfy this in- 
sistent demand of men: “I am come that they 
might have life and that they might have it abun- 
dantly.” 

After so sanguine a promise, what of the per- 
formance? 

We shall, of course, all admit, with a kind of 
sad sincerity, that the influence of Christianity 
on the world in these past nineteen centuries has 
been lamentably weakened by the ignorances, 
frailties, and hypocrisies of its professors. But 
what of the thing itself? 

Some, with evident bias, have framed an indict- 
ment against Christianity as something which is 
in itself hostile to human progress and to human 
joy. Representative of the one attitude, Voltaire 


The Christ of History 145 


pointed to the spectacle of the European wars 
(even as many have done in our own time) with 
the indignant cry: Religion chrétienne! voila tes 
effets! And, representative of the other attitude, 
would-be neo-pagans, like Swinburne, have stig- 
matized ,the religion of “the pale Nazarene” as 
destructive of all that joyous and exuberant life 
which, as they affect to believe, was the abiding 
atmosphere of ancient Greece. 

A much larger class, not ignorant of actual con- 
ditions in the “hard, heathen world,” to which the 
religion of Christ spoke of newness of life, yet 
impatient at the degree or the speed with which 
the hopes of men have been fulfilled, ask doubt- 
fully as to whether Christ has not after all proved 
a disappointment. In Stephen Phillips’ beautiful 
poem, Christ in Hades, we find at first all the 
souls of men flocking about the Saviour Who has 
descended to the world of shades. They feel a 
“waft of early sweet,” and “caught in intolerable 
hope,” they thrill to the sense of all that His vic- 
tory must mean. ‘Then presently, because He 
stirred not immediately to unloose their bonds, 
rather than be left longer to “the bleak magnifi- 
cence of endless hope,” they drift off, one by one, 
“into the ancient sorrow.” 


“Yet many could not, after such a sight, 

At once retire, but must from time to time 
Linger with undetermining bright eyes. 

Now at each parting way some said farewell, 
And each man took his penance up, perhaps 


146 The Universal Faith 


Less easily from such an interval! 

The vault closed back, woe upon woe, the wheel 
Revolved, the stone rebounded; for that time 
Hades her interrupted life resumed.” 


Is this a true picture of the world’s reaction to 
the Gospel revelation? 

Of course, many elements of human hope had, 
by reason of imperfect understanding and expres- 
sion, necessarily to be disappointed. As it was 
with the Jew after all the waiting for “the ful- 
ness of time,” so it must inevitably be with the 
Christian. Those who looked forward to the Christ 
failed to recognize Him when He appeared. “He 
came unto His own things, and they that were 
His own received Him not.” Similarly, those to 
whom Christ has already come are not by any 
means wholly conscious of the extent and method 
of His presence. 

i. First, many have conceptions as to the char- 
acter of the Kingdom which are so at variance 
with facts as to be very properly doomed to dis- 
appointment. There are still those who prefer a 
Messiah who announces Himself as bread-giver, 
miracle-worker, king of a secular realm, rather 
than as the spiritual lord of a spiritual world of- 
fering the Word of God as sustenance and the 
Cross as the true path to victory. In such books 
as The Call of the Carpenter, popular a few years 
ago, it was curiously evident how readily Jesus 
recommends Himself, even though a failure, as 
revolutionist instead of as the Saviour from sin. 


The Christ of History 147 


ii. Then, secondly, there are those who are sadly 
disappointed because the Kingdom does not come 
with observation and much more speedily than 
is obviously the case. Our impatient Americanism 
cries out, “How long!” more insistently than did 
the martyr saints of Judaism from beneath the 
altar. All kinds of schemes are advertised for 
“speeding up” the “mills of God,” some of them 
mainly dependent upon the using of so much 
money. There are many today who would have 
placed themselves on the side of Peter rather than 
on the side of the Master when the impatient 
apostle protested against the Cross: “This be far 
from Thee! This shall not be unto Thee!” Some 
perhaps might even have been with Judas in the 
attempt to force Christ’s hand. 

Such disappointments are inevitable in the case 
of disciples who have misunderstood Christ’s 
method and His mission, or in the case of the 
world which from the first has had no understand- 
ing at all of either. 

Yet to those who have followed Him along the 
way, and to whom He has revealed His secret, 
there can be no disappointment. Even to the 
world in general there can never be disappoint- 
ment equal to that which occurs inevitably when 
men who have tried to become citizens of the far 
country come to themselves and begin to know 
themselves in want. Even the disappointments of 
the genuine disciple, moreover, are but the meas- 
ure of the hope with which the words and the 


148 The Universal Faith 


character of Jesus have inspired them. “We 
trusted that this was He which should have re- 
deemed Israel,” can never be said without some 
uplift of heart and spirit. 

It is our privilege to go further still and show 
that such a trust has never been falsified. Some 
may not need the witness of history, since they 
possess for ever in themselves reason for the con- 
fession: “One thing I know, that whereas I was 
blind now I see.” But, with this inner witness or 
without it, it is still helpful to recall to mind the 
Gesta Christi throughout the ages which lie be- 
tween the first century A. D. and ourselves. 

Moreover, in making some survey of what the 
spirit of Christ has accomplished in the world, 
we must remember that the spirit of Christ 
works over a much wider arena than is cov- 
ered by organized Christianity or even by hu- 
man instrumentality. The work of Christ is 
greater than anything accomplished by the Nicene 
Fathers, greater than the theology of S. Augus- 
tine, greater than the reforming zeal of Savon- 
arola, greater than the spirit of Luther. If it be 
said, as is frequently the case, that in certain 
ages of Christian history Art or Science or even 
Religion flourished in spite of Christians rather 
than because of them, the answer must be that 
here too Christ was at work. Many a time the 
things opposed by the purblind Christianity of 
an age were proofs of the presence of Christ still 
at work in the world. The Light that lighteneth 


The Christ of History 149 


every man has shone from many unexpected quar- 
ters, quarters sometimes condemned as the abodes 
of heresy and unbelief and even of atheism. Light 
has come from the lecture-rooms of skeptical pro- 
fessors, from the laboratories of men of science, 
from the pulpits of “little Bethels,” or from the 
‘“posturings and petticoatings” of extravagant 
ritual, 

But let us briefly suggest what these Gesta 
Christi are: 

i. Christ has indeed made it possible for men 
to look upon the face of God. “No man cometh 
unto the Father but by Me,” is a saying which 
has been most abundantly vindicated. Other re- 
ligious systems have arisen, Gnosticism to cater 
to man’s pride of intellect, Manichaeanism to of- 
fer to men an explanation of the problem of evil, 
Muhammadanism to give the world what was 
supposed to be a purer monotheism than that of- 
fered by the Churches of the East. But no sys- 
tem added one new truth to theology. Eclectic 
faiths not a few were propounded, but all proved 
inorganic and lacking in vitality. In the effort to 
create a religion more universal than Christianity, 
religion was made less than Christian. New re- 
ligious teachers rose from time to time to correct 
an over-emphasis at one point or to supply a for- 
gotten truth at another. Yet none has succeeded, 
except for a limited time by the exploitation of a 
segmentary truth, whereas Christianity for all 
time stands as witness to Him Who is “the ful- 


150 The Universal Faith 


ness of Him that filleth all in all.” Philosophers 
have criticised the Creeds at one point or another, 
and have asked for definitions where Christ has 
given a symbol, but, whereas the exactest defini- 
tion has become discredited in a generation, the 
symbol remains for ever as guide to child and 
philosopher alike along that infinite path which 
leads at last to God. Human elements have en- 
tered into the exposition of Christian conceptions 
of God, as into the exposition of the record 
whereby these conceptions have been mani- 
fested. Even as Carlyle was repelled from using 
the “corn” which his friend Emerson sent 
him, because, ground by the soft mill-stones of 
England, it became mingled with so much grit as 
to be uneatable, so the preaching of the Christ has 
often enough robbed men of the full revelation of 
the God in Christ. Yet no human misrepresenta- 
tion, grievous though this has often been, has 
succeeded altogether in destroying man’s access 
to the Father, however adulterated has been the 
revelation through the ignorance and the perver- 
sity of men. 

With so many stupidities due to ignorance, with 
so much over-exquisiteness of fastidious scholasti- 
cism, with so much precise definition where to be 
precise is to be precisely wrong, with so much 
exactness of formula where exactness must nec- 
essarily be falsification, it is not surprising that 
the God in Christ is not yet wholly known. Yet 
the truth remains as ever that— 


The Christ of History 151 


“The acknowledgment of God in Christ, 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it, 
And hath so far advanced thee to be wise.” 


ii. As with the revelation of God, so with the 
revelation of all that we mean by life. Beyond the 
ideal of the “Christ-like” life, as the goal for hu- 
man effort, as the resting place towards which the 
love of God is carrying our weary and reluctant 
feet, no human imagination has travelled. While, 
as in the story of the Christ statue which was al- 
Ways just a little above the stature of him who 
would measure himself against it, the Christ life 
always seems so near our own as to stimulate our 
effort, it yet never fails to represent something be- 
yond the attainment of the most consummate 
sainthood. While natives of India have ridiculed 
the missionaries of Christ, they have still claimed 
India for the Christ ideal. While working men, 
as Dr. R. J. Campbell has reminded us, have 
hissed the Churches, they have cheered for Jesus. 
“The most effective taunt that can be levelled at 
inconsistent Christians is to say that they are un- 
like their Master,” “Jesus seems to sum up and 
focus the religious ideal for mankind. His influ- 
ence for good is greater than that of all the mas- 
ters of men put together and still goes on increas- 
ing.” 

Other ideals of life may allure for the moment, 
but they reach at last a cul de sac, such as in- 
evitably brings the verdict, Vanitas vanitatum, 


152 The Universal Faith 


omnia vanitas. But in the Christian life the sub- 
stance is discovered of which all shadows, whether 
of power, or pleasure, or riches, or knowledge, 
are, not the mockery, but the assurance and pre- 
diction. 

To Christ and to the Christ-like life through 
the ages we have been considering, without dis- 
tinction of race, or age, or sex, or language, men 
have turned as to the water springing up unto 
everlasting life, and have found therein their 
heart’s desire. 

“T came to Jesus and I drank 
Of that life-giving stream; 


My thirst was quenched, my soul revived, 
And now I live in Him.” 


What a long pilgrimage of souls, from 8S, Paul 
and Justin Martyr to S. Francis d’Assisi, and 
from S. Francis to Gordon and Stonewall Jack- 
son, yes, even to Gandhi and General Féng, have 
been led to affirm with the great Saint of Hippo: 
“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is 
restless till it rest in Thee.” 

No one Christian may express it all, and, fail- 
ing to express the whole, he necessarily feels him- 
self incomplete. But, so far as he expresses Christ 
at all, he finds himself growing daily into con- 
sciousness of a nobler manhood and feels himself 
both commissioned and empowered to play more 
worthily his part in life. 

iii. Thirdly, whatever have been the defects of 
individual Christians, Christ has undoubtedly 


The Christ of History 155 


been for nearly twenty centuries the unfailing 
source of every stream of social reform by which 
history has been irrigated. The words of Sir Ed- 
win Arnold, placed upon the prophetic lips of the 
herald angel at Bethlehem, have been literally 
fulfilled : 


“Foreseeing how this Babe, born lowlily, 

Should, past dispute, since now achieved is this— 
Bring Earth great gifts of blessing and of bliss; 
Date from that crib the Dynasty of Love; 

Strip his misused thunderbolts from Jove; 

Bend to their knees Rome’s Caesars, break the chain 
From the slave’s neck; set sick souls free again, 
Bitterly bound by priests, and scribes, and scrolls; 
And heal, with balm of pardon, sinking souls; 
Should Mercy to her vacant throne restore, 

Teach Right to kings and patience to the poor: 
Should by His sweet Name all names overthrow, 
And by His lovely words the quick seeds sow 

Of golden equities and brotherhood, 

Of pity, peace, and gentle praise of good; 

Of knightly honor, holding life in trust 

For God and Lord and all things pure and just; 
Lowly to Woman; for Maid Mary’s sake 

Lifting our sister from the dust to take 

In homes her equal place, the Household’s Queen, 
Crowned and august who sport and thrall had been; 
Of arts adorning life, of charities 

Gracious and wide, because the impartial skies 
Roof one race in; and poor, weak, mean, oppressed, 
Are children of one bounteous Mother’s breast, 
One Father’s care.” 


Other things, no less parts of the purpose of 
God, have, of course, entered into the effort of or- 
ganized Christianity to swell the great volume of 


154 The Universal Faith 


human labor for the amelioration of social con- 
ditions, but it will not be denied that the enthu- 
siasm for humanity which has had in the main 
such fruitful results during the past nineteen cen- 
turies is, in very truth,— 
“the wave 

Of love which set so deep and strong 

From Christ’s (still) open grave.” 

Still the larger number of social reformers are 
to be found in the ranks of Christian believers; 
still social reform derives its main motive from 
the religion of the Incarnation; still the courage 
to go on and endure in the often disheartening 
effort to lessen the ills of life beneath the sun 
springs from the optimism and hope of Christian — 
faith. 

All human instincts for freedom and fellow- 
ship, the very first stirrings of generous impulse 
to be embodied by and by in systems of chivalry, 
all aspirations everywhere for the pressing “on to 
the bounds of the waste, on to the City of God,” 
all things included, under whatsoever disguise, in 
what we understand as Progress,—have found at 
once their first incentive, their propulsive force, 
their pathway and their goal, in that conception 
of human brotherhood which Christ has revealed, 
—the corollary of the doctrine of God as Father. 

To detail separately the Gesta Christi which 
justify us in making so sweeping an assertion, 
would be to do nothing less than to write the story 
of civilization in its entirety with special eye to 


The Christ of History 155 


the principles which both suggest and sustain all 
stages of reform. 

It would be to tell the story of the fight made 
for physical freedom, the fight waged and won by 
the spirit which brought about the triumph of 
Jesus on the Cross, establishing all along the line 
those recognized gains to human happiness which 
broaden out from precedent to precedent. 

It is the story of gigantic evils, such as slavery, 
overthrown, not by revolutionary forces acting 
from without, but by the operation of principles 
fermenting within the body itself. It is the story 
of the abolition of tyrannies and despotisms, not 
through the protests of an angry serfdom, mighty 
to destroy but powerless to reconstruct, but rather 
by the awakening of the common man to know his 
kinship with God through the Incarnation of 
Jesus Christ. So democracy becomes possible, not 
because of the tyranny of numbers superseding 
the tyranny of privilege, but through each man’s 
sense of infinite worthfulness to God through 
Christ. 

It is, again, to tell the story of the sun-rise of 
intellectual and spiritual freedom, the gradual 
dispelling of the night shadows of ignorance and 
superstition. The foundation and maintenance of 
schools and universities are all incidents in the 
effort to follow Christ as the Truth. Such follow- 
ing has necessarily included its conservatives who 
feared the loss of what had been already won, 
and its radicals eager to press on to those other 


156 The Universal Faith 


things the Spirit must still lift above the world’s 
horizon. But, whether the wisdom was the goad 
which pricked men on or the nails which fastened 
them in secure allegiance to what had already 
been attained, the pursuit of truth was but a 
synonym for the following of Christ. To serve God 
with all the mind was as laudable an ambition 
as to serve Him with body or with spirit. Thus 
was the desire for more light nourished in the 
bosom of the Church, until the whole community 
became in this respect the Church by taking over 
the responsibility for that instruction which had 
been for so long the prerogative of the Church 
alone. 

Once again, it is to tell the story of the Love of 
God reaching out everywhere, by means of human 
hands, to touch humanity at every one of its 
many sores. It is the story of the building of hos- 
pitals and the establishing of almshouses, of the 
gradually growing sense of responsibility for 
prisoners and the insane, for the feeble-minded 
and defective, for the needy of every sort. If these, 
too, represent institutions which the modern state 
deems its own peculiar charge, apart from the ef- 
forts of organized religion, let us remember that 
it was Christian sympathy which forced men to 
see the necessity for care of this kind, and that 
the withdrawal of that sympathy, out of supposed 
sufficiency of scientific efficiency, would speedily 
destroy the value of much that is at present be- 
ing accomplished. Let us add, too, that, since “the 


The Christ of History 157 


leaves of the tree are for the healing of the na- 
tions,” still outside the walls of the City of God, 
the extension of works of mercy, as in the case of 
the Red Cross, and all forms of welfare work, to 
heathen lands, is still one of the fruits of the In- 
carnation of the Son of God. 

As such conclusions emerge naturally from the 
historical survey of the past, so do they arise out 
of a present-day survey of what is being accom- 
plished wherever the agents of Christ are at work 
bearing their proper witness to the presence of 
the Holy Spirit among men. On a recent visit to 
China, I entered in a certain city one of the tem- 
ples for the worship of the City God, fitly enough 
known as the “Temple of Hell.” All around three 
sides of the court-yard were the stucco groups 
representing the torments of the damned in the 
ten departments of the infernal regions, but, ter- 
rible as these representations were, far more ter- 
rible were the swarms of lepers and other victims 
of loathsome disease, while on the flagstones lay 
the sick and dying covered with flies and in some 
cases at the last gasp. All these were absolutely 
uncared for, while the glances of the crowd were 
given to some juggler in the corner of the court 
rather than to the suffering. Neither the efficiency 
of modern Chinese business, nor the enlightenment 
of modern Chinese education, not to mention the 
boasted progress of modern Chinese republican- 
ism, had one gesture of consolation or help for 
these miserable victims of neglect. Only the repre- 


158 The Universal Faith 


sentatives of Christ had sympathy to offer. All 
over that land and over all the other backward 
countries of the world, it is Christ alone Who 
moves, even as He moved in Galilee of old, to com- 
fort and relieve, to cure the body, enlighten the 
mind, and save the soul. That is why there is still 
a place for Jesus in the foulest haunts of earth,— 


“till e’en the witless Gadarene, 
Preferring Christ to swine, shall feel 
That life is sweetest when ’tis clean.” 


Lastly, it is important to note that the move- 
ments which are striving today to carry men be- 
yond the narrowness of nationalism and away 
from the limitations of a merely chauvinistic pa- 
triotism, are, at least in inspiration, Christian 
movements. As Christ, on the Cross, drew all men 
unto Him, so the truest martyrs of patriotism 
have known and affirmed that “Patriotism is not 
enough.” Men may fail over and over again to se- 
cure a wise and effective internationalism. 
Leagues and Covenants may from time to time be 
propounded, only to break down in operation 
through the wilfulness and pettiness of human na- 
ture. Those who recommend them and plead for 
them may for a long time to come seem to be 
politically impotent, and the professional politi- 
cian may feel himself secure in despising the 
forces he opposes as things visionary and imprac- 
ticable. But after every defeat, the spirit which 
is seeking the realization of the doctrine of hu- 


The Christ of History 159 


man brotherhood, just because it is the spirit of 
Jesus, will rise purified and strengthened to the 
task before it. In the end the victory of the Lamb 
over the Dragon, the Wild Beast, and the False 
Prophet, must be manifest. Men will go on wor- 
shipping, it may be, for awhile the Beast which 
has been overcome, still putting their trust in the 
discredited idols of force and fraud, but it will 
be to their own shaming. Moreover, out of such 
shaming must come at last penitence, change of 
mind, and return to Christ. 

So at length the vision of perfection and re- 
deemed humanity as a City shall be realized. As 
a dream, almost as a mirage, such a vision has 
hung before the eyes of men from the beginning. 
Again and again have men created communities 
within which they expected to find all social per- 
fection, with all the strength and joy and suffi- 
ciency that they had yearned for. But, again and 
again, the realization had been frustrated by sin, 
and many learned to say, as a Camelot, “Lord, 
there is no such city anywhere.” Yet the world’s 
idealists continued to come forth from Ur, and 
Sodom, and Babylon, and Nineveh, and Rome, “to 
plant the great Hereafter” anew in the desert, 
confident that the desert should at length blos- 
som as the rose. 

In a world so transformed should at last ap- 
pear the “continuing city,” built from earth up- 
wards, yet coming downward from the heavens, 
the city of principles eternally regnant in heaven, 


160 The Universal Faith 


the world of being, now to triumph in the earth, 
the realm of becoming. 

That City, is, in very truth, among us, and 
through its wide-opened gates the glory of the na- 
tions is already passing. The history of the ages 
at whose story we have glanced is the history of 
this gradually increasing revelation. Already the 
light of those walls, compacted of every variety of 
preciousness, but blended into the one, white, per- 
fect ray, has attracted the longing eyes of men. 
Already within these walls all the pilgrims of 
time may find that for which their hearts have 
craved, even the presence of God, access to the 
Tree of Life and the Water of Life, freedom from 
sin and the fear of death, happy fellowship in the 
service which springs spontaneously from the love | 
of God and man. 

It remains now to make sure of the consumma- 
tion of so fair and auspicious a beginning, the 
consummation which shall carry on the story of 
mankind upon this earth to the point when man, 
having learned to know— 


“himself a child 
Set in this rudimental star 
To learn the alphabet of Being,” 


shall, continuing to grow, advance at last 


“in manhood’s prime, 
To walk in some celestial clime; 
Sit in the Father’s House, and be 
An inmate of Eternity.” 


CHAPTER VIII 


““‘THE CHRIST THAT IS TO BE”’ 


“Come, O Thou that hast the seven stars in Thy right 
hand, appoint Thy chosen priests according to their order 
and courses of old, to minister before Thee, and duly to 
dress and pour out the consecrated oil into Thy holy and 
ever-burning lamps. Thou hast sent out the spirit of 
prayer upon Thy servants over all the earth to this ef- 
fect, and stored up their voices as the sound of many 
waters about Thy throne. ...O perfect and accomplish 
Thy glorious acts, for men may leave their works un- 
finished, but Thou art a God; Thy nature is perfection. 
... The times and seasons pass along under Thy feet, 
to go and come at Thy bidding; and as Thou didst dig- 
nify our fathers’ days with many revelations, above all 
their foregoing ages since Thou tookest the flesh, so 
Thou canst vouchsafe to us, though unworthy, as large 
a portion of Thy Spirit as Thou pleasest; for who shall 
prejudice Thy all-governing will? Seeing the power of 
Thy grace is not passed away with the primitive times, 
as fond and faithless men imagine, but Thy Kingdom is 
now at hand, and Thou art standing at the door, come 
forth out of Thy royal chambers, O Prince of all the 
kings of the earth; put on the visible robes of Thy im- 
perial majesty, take up that unlimited sceptre which 
Thy Almighty Father hath bequeathed Thee; for now 
the voice of Thy bride calls Thee, and all creatures sigh 
to be renewed.”—Nilton. 


161 


162 The Universal Faith 


SYNOPSIS 


Mr. Wells on the religion of the future—Is Christianity 
a “specialised form?’—the significance of our dissatis- 
faction with religion as it is—the spur of discontent 
among the assets of religion—our misuse of the records 
of revelation—opposition to the doctrine of evolution— 
misconceptions as to the Church—and the Ministry—and 
Sacraments—and Creeds—dissatisfaction with the fruits 
of religion in the lives of Christians—our impulses strong 
and our sense of obligation weak—our slow advance 
from obsolete and outworn expressions of religion—‘the 
Tree of Faith’—our sectional and sectarian Christianity 
—the limitations of national religion. 

The program for the future—need of a united Chris- 
tianity—theories of unity—by absorption—by subjugation 
—by federation—unity in harmony—‘‘the ship that found 
herself.” 

Wanted, a Catholic Christianity—no element of wit- 
ness to be lost in passing through us—‘on broken pieces 
of the ship’—‘the whole counsel of God.” 

Wanted, a spiritual Christianity—recent tendencies 
towards “efficiency’’—the evils of over-organization—‘‘the 
story of a commercial clergyman.” 

“How it strikes a contemporary’—the mountain and 
the dew—the foundations not cast down—the building 
of the New Jerusalem. 


N the concluding pages of his Owtline of His- 

tory Mr. H. G. Wells, in prophetic mood, ven- 
tures upon the statement that the future world- 
state will be based upon a common world relig- 
ion. Of this religion, after his usual dogmatic 
fashion, the writer declares: “This will not be 
Christianity, nor Islam, nor Buddhism, nor any 
such specialized form of religion, but religion it- 


“The Christ That Is to Be’ 163 


self pure and undefiled; the Eightfold Way, the 
Kingdom of Heaven, brotherhood, creative service, 
and self-forgetfulness.” 

Mr. Wells’ reference to Christianity as a “spe- 
cialized form of religion” shows as limited a con- 
ception of Christianity as does Mr. Hardy’s de- 
scription of Christianity as “a local thing.” One 
need not here ask whether the distinguished novel- 
ist includes in his list of the elements necessary 
to make “religion pure and undefiled” all that 
Christianity claims to be, but one may fairly ask 
which of the five elements named as essentials is 
not present in Christianity even as generally un- 
derstood and presented. Of course, if Christianity 
be a “specialized form of religion,” all that we 
have said in earlier chapters falls at once to the 
ground. On the other hand, it should be obvious to 
those who have read these chapters that the asser- 
tion is a complete begging of the question, against 
the evidence of every claim made for Christianity 
by its Founder and its very character as con- 
trasted with other religious systems. 

Of course, this enunciation of what Christianity 
is ideally and potentially will always appear to 
be rising up in judgment against the spectacle of 
what Christianity is at the present stage of its 
career. The ideal, in this present world, must ever 
be the enemy of the real, the best the enemy of the 
good, the part must seem to be the contradiction 
of the whole. Surely, there is no more certain 
consequence of the presence of Christianity in the 


164 The Universal Faith 


world or in the heart of the individual than this 
ever recurring sense of revolt against what has 
hitherto been attained out of the vision vouch- 
safed of heights as yet unreached. “Be always dis- 
pleased,” writes S. Augustine, “with what thou 
art, if thou wouldest attain to that thou wouldest 
be.” No Christian individual but makes his daily 
appeal from the imperfection he knows and con- 
demns to the fulness promised and assured to him 
by the operation of divine grace. It is the spirit 
of Christ itself which cries out for the superses- 
sion of the static by the dynamic: 


“Ring out a slowly dying cause, 

And ancient forms of party strife; 
Ring in the nobler modes of life, 
With sweeter manners, purer laws. . 
Ring in the valiant man and free, 
The larger heart, the kindlier hand; 
Ring out the darkness of the land, ~ 
Ring in the Christ that is to be.” 


Thus we should place first among the assets 
which Christianity has placed within our reach, 
in order that we may aspire to realize among us 
“the Christ to be,” this divine element of dissat- 
isfaction with what at present we know, and do, 
and are. It is the evidence the world needs that 
the stream whose source is beneath the altar of 
sacrifice is still flowing with ever widening tide 
towards the infinite ocean. It is the evidence we 
all need that the Holy Spirit is still at work trans- 


“The Christ That Is to Be” 165 


forming the primeval Chaos into the Cosmos of 
the divine purpose. For it is important to recol- 
lect that our discontent is not with the spring, 
nor even with the stream, but rather with the 
soil that discolors, or the banks which obstruct, 
with the shoals which produce the eddies, the mud 
that defiles the limpid outflow of the source. Not 
against Christ, let me repeat, is the complaint of 
men, so much as against those who, calling them- 
selves Christians, misrepresent both the Master 
and His message to a world which, in the main, 
knows Christians only by the measure of the sta- 
ture of the fulness of Christ. 

1. Before casting our eyes forward to the fu- 
ture for a vision of Christianity more reassuring 
than that suggested by Mr. Wells, let us pass in 
review some of the many ways in which the failure 
of Christians has not only excused but even com- 
pelled dissatisfaction with the Christianity of to- 
day. It will be plain that, as in the old story of 
Mercury reporting to Jupiter that most of the ills 
of which men complained as proofs of the divine 
indifference were perversions of the blessings 
which the gods had given, so many at least of the 
most flagrant failures of modern religion have 
been due to the misunderstanding and the mis- 
use of the means of grace. 

i. For a first example, there can be little doubt 
that the current disbelief, and consequent dis- 
use, of the Bible are in large part due to misuse 
of the records of the divine revelation by the very 


166 The Universal Faith 


people who profess themselves the defenders of 
Holy Writ against unbelief. 

How wonderful the range and variety of the 
literature which, by means of history, poetry, law 
codes, prophetic discourses, proverb, and story, 
out of the mouth of psalmist and sage, farmer 
and fisherman, out of the obscure utterances of 
folk poetry and the ecstasies of unknown men and 
women, out of the long story of Israel from the 
early annals of the race to the more personal ut- 
terances of her latest teachers,—all, moreover, 
fused into a single document by the sense of one 
stedfast purpose shaping itself to the fulfilment 
of Israel’s hope and the world’s desire! 

And how woeful the waste through the miscon- 
ception which has preferred the husk to the kernel, 
and has sought a text-book of science, or the prose 
of hard, literal, unimaginative “fact,” where God 
has offered the revelation of Himself! 

How difficult it has been for men to perceive 
that even as Christ on earth “without a parable 
spake nothing unto” the multitudes, so God’s 
method always has been to speak by parables and 
symbols rather than by the blinding blaze of 
revelation unconditioned by our human imper- 
fection. 

It is, of course, only fair to recognize that, in 
the discovery of new truth, Christian men and 
women have not infrequently been among the first 
to welcome the light as a gift from Him Who 
said: “I have many things to say unto you, but 


“The Christ That Is to Be’’ 167 


ye cannot bear them now.” Yet, as in the instance 
of that strange recrudescence of reactionary ex- 
egesis which is at present rallying opposition 
against the teaching of evolution, not because it 
has been disproved by science, but because it con- 
flicts with the cosmogony accepted by the Semitic 
peoples three thousand years ago, many professed 
Christians are making it exceedingly hard for an 
educated generation, in America and all the world 
over, to be at once true to the God Who reveals 
Himself in Nature and to the God Whose revela- 
tion is contained within the pages of the Chris- 
tian Scriptures. Out of a misconceived reverence 
for some humanly framed theory of Biblical in- 
spiration, they are willing to place themselves 
stubbornly athwart the path of honest searchers 
after truth, and to beget in the minds of these the 
suspicion that God’s revelation of Himself, as 
asserted in the Christian faith, is founded upon 
a fraud. It is not strange that religious beliefs 
built up on foundations of wood, hay, and stubble, 
yet fanatically guarded as though they were the 
very palladium of religion, the eternal Rock never 
to be shaken, should come down with a terrible 
erash when young people in our schools and col- 
leges begin to test things for themselves. More 
than occasionally fault is found with our colleges 
and universities because of the number of students 
who, midway in their college career, seem to part 
with their earlier religious beliefs: the fault 
should rather be placed upon the shoulders of 


168 The Universal Faith 


those who have sent forth these young people with 
a mischievously inadequate conception of religion, 
armed, like Don Quixote, with arms of paste- 
board, where they ought to have been trained to 
wield the true “sword of the Spirit, which is the 
Word of God.” 

ii, With similar unintelligence we have allowed 
men to misconceive of the meaning and signifi- 
cance of the means of grace specially associated 
with the Church, its Ministry, its Sacraments, and 
its Creeds. Some have learned to think of the 
Church as an ecclesiastical despotism modelled 
after the administrative system of Imperial Rome 
and destined to be built up by similar methods of. 
expansion, not without much use of force and 
fraud. Others have had in mind nothing but the 
machinery for the exploitation of segmentary 
truths, a broken mirror giving distorted reflections 
of the doctrine of Christ, according to the exposi- 
tion of this or that person or this or that age. 
Meanwhile, the glorious ideal of the Church as 
the living Body of Christ, complete in Him, build- 
ing itself up to the realization of a world-wide so- 
ciety of redeemed men, One, Holy, Catholic, Apos- 
tolic, is but faintly seen. 

iii. Subordinate to this misconception of the 
Church is the misconception of the Christian min- 
istry. On the one hand we find it considered a 
easte, and on the other hand as a class, man- 
chosen, man-commissioned, delegates whose main 
object is to build up a personal following within 


“The Christ That Is to Be’’ 169 


the narrow fences of this or that party or this or 
that denomination. And, in the meantime, how 
little of the humility which recognizes the privi- 
lege of being used to interpret God to Man and 
Man to God! 

iv. Again, we may very well be dissatisfied with 
our misuse of the Sacraments of the Christian 
Church. Sometimes we have turned them into 
mere survivals of those old rites of imitative 
magic, to which we have made reference, instead 
of seeing in them the fulfilment of the same; some- 
times we have treated them as meaningless pieces 
of traditional ritualism; sometimes even the tests 
of party allegiance or of adhesion to a theory. All 
this, instead of finding in them the approach, by 
way of love, to the immanence of God in this 
world of ours, a God Who admits us to union with 
Himself and feeds us in body and soul out of His 
own communicable life. 

v. Lastly, so far as these grounds of stimulat- 
ing dissatisfaction are concerned, we adjudge our- 
selves guilty of the misuse of the Christian Creeds. 
We employ them not so much for the necessarily 
approximate formulation of truths to which our 
minds and spirits reach out by means of symbol, 
but rather as definitions which have been estab- 
lished with a kind of Quranic finality, to be in- 
terpreted with a precision which makes heresy of 
all advancing understanding and appreciation. 
Or else we use them, or misuse them, after the 
manner of archaic documents, to be disregarded 


170 The Universal Faith 


or denied at pleasure, and as having no vital signi- 
ficance to the unity and stability of the Body of 
Christ. 

2. Our confidence in the validity of the Chris- 
tian message forces us to the acknowledgement 
of a second class of reasons for discontent, as- 
sociated, not, as in the above cases, with the mis- 
use of the means of grace, but our manifest failure 
to grow up as Christians in such a way as to fur- 
nish a fair record of the Christ life, or to supply 
to men some inkling of the possibilities of human 
life within the Church. 

Let us not mistake. Christians are termed in the 
New Testament “saints,” not for what they are, 
but for what they are capable of becoming. The 
Christian ideal is always a flying goal, unreached 
yet ever sought. Not even the character of the 
saintliest is “the measure of the stature of the 
fulness of Christ.” The failures, moreover, of 
Christians are frequently only the inevitable slips 
of these forced to the apostolic confession: “The 
good that I would I do not; the evil that IT would 
not, that I do.” 

“Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest,— 

Himself the undefeated that shall be; 
Failure, disgrace, he flings them you, to test 
His triumph in eternity.” 

Yet there is a failure which is never confused, 
even by the world, with the lapses of those whose 
attitude is always deliberately Christwards. There 
is a loss of ideals, a sinking back to conformity 


“The Christ That Is to Be’’ 171 


with the fashions of the world, a measuring of our- 
selves by ourselves, and a comparing of ourselves 
among ourselves, a practical surrender to the 
world in all that is spiritually distinctive. The re- 
ligious impulse may still survive, and at times stir 
us to unwonted depths of our nature in the direc- 
tion of remorse and renewed resolution. But we 
find ourselves incapable, nevertheless, of sustained 
sense of obligation. Where the world and Christ 
conflict, the world wins easily and the claims of 
Christ are put aside for that which is convenient. 
This, too, the world, not unwilling to pay Chris- 
tianity the compliment of placing its ideals high, 
notes, and draws thence for itself the conclusion 
that Christianity no longer possesses the old com- 
pelling power which rescued the most desperate 
sinners from their sins, in spite of the power and 
habit of the sin, in spite of the prevailing stand- 
ards of place and age. 

Nor must we forget that there are men and 
women not a few who come to the Church’s door 
with the appeal upon their lips, “We would see 
Jesus,” only to find, through the association with 
Christians, a cooling of their enthusiasm, and a 
blurring of that vision of the Christ which had 
captivated their soul. Where ideals have long 
ceased to live, even if not repudiated, the profes- 
sion of religion, not only without reality, but 
veneered disgustingly with hypocritic cant, be- 
comes only too possible. The slackened sense of 
obligation within the Church leavens inevitably 


172 The: Universal Fatih 


with evil the life of the world outside, and the pub- 
lic sins of professing Christians become destruc- 
tive to themselves and stumbling-blocks to others. 

3. In the next place, we cannot but be deeply 
concerned at the slow and reluctant steps we take 
away from outworn and obsolete embodiments of 
the religious spirit. Too often we seem to prefer 
the empty shells and cast-off husks of truth rather 
than the following of that living spirit which is 
ever seeking restatement and ever leading on to 
a new order and power of life. How often we need 
to recall and ponder upon those wise words of 
Whittier: 


“The Tree of Faith its bare, dry boughs must shed, 
That nearer Heaven the living ones may climb; 
The false must fail, though from the shores of Time 
The old lament be heard, Great Pan is dead. 

That wail is Error’s from her high place hurled, 
This sharp recoil is evil undertrod, 

The Time’s unrest an angel sent from God, 
Troubling with Life the waters of the world. 
Even as they list the winds of the Spirit blow, 

To turn or break our century rusted vanes, 

Sands shift and waste; the rock alone remains 
Where, led of Heaven, the strong tides come and go, 
And storm-clouds, rent of thunderbolt and wind, 
Leave, free from mist, the permanent stars behind.” 


This, moreover, applies not only to intellectual 
but also to very practical questions. The persis- 
tence with which tribal and national conceptions 
of religion cling to the skirts of our Church life 
is extremely discouraging to those who do not 


“The Christ That Is to Be” 173 


look far back and far forward. The history of 
Christianity has too often been the story of clash- 
ing segments of a potential catholicity. The philo- 
sophic East clashed with the practical West, lead- 
ing to the result that movements which might 
have been welcomed as complementary and con- 
ducive to comprehensiveness were put under the 
ban as heresies and condemned as schismatic. 
How much of the missionary work of the Six- 
teenth Century in the Orient was marred just be- 
cause Portuguese Jesuits and Spanish Domini- 
cans could not, even in the presence of the 
heathen, keep in suppression the tradition of their 
nationality and their religious order! How many 
times have the missionary heroes of France and 
Germany clouded the magnificent witness of their 
martyrdom by activities which made it difficult 
to distinguish between the service of the Cross 
and the service of the flag! Has it not been claimed 
that an anti-religious French Republic charged 
itself with the duty of protecting missionaries in 
the Orient mainly because of the political ad- 
vantage which was thereby secured? Has it not 
also been maintained that British missionaries 
in India have been handicapped rather than 
helped through their association with the rulers 
of the land? Do not our American missionaries, 
too, sometimes regard Christianization as well 
nigh equivalent to Americanization, and find lit- 
tle with which to sympathize in the national 
ideals of other countries? 


174 The Universal Faith 


So far we have dealt almost exclusively with 
that side of our hope for the future which springs 
from dissatisfaction with the past and the pres- 
ent. The major duty, however, remains, namely 
to have a real program for the future. The influ- 
ence of that spur of discontent which enables us 
to recognize and repent the defects of present-day 
Christianity is of little use unless it stimulate our 
determination to realize a Christianity worthy of 
the Founder and altogether adequate for the needs 
of the race. Not through the shortening of the Al- 
mighty Hand, not through the exhaustion of the 
sacrificial love of Christ, not through the de- 
pleted power of the Holy Spirit, has our religion 
been slow to move the tides of time, but simply 
through our own lack of faith and love and zeal. 

What, then, are the things we most desiderate, 
not as some addition of our own devising, now for 
the first time discovered, but rather as the simpler 
and sincerer use of what has been all along avail- 
able out of the infinite resources of the Founder 
of the Faith? 

Let us bring this chapter to a close by speak- 
ing of three of the most obvious needs. 

1. We need a united Christianity. The desire for 
this is, of course, nothing less than the desire to 
fulfil the Saviour’s prayer, “That they all may be 
. one.” But men have sought for unity in very va- 
rious ways. There has prevailed with some the 
belief that unity is to be secured by blending all 
representations of Christianity into one homogen- 


“The Christ That Is to Be’’ 175 


eous and unorganized system, all things, being re- 
duced to the lowest common denominator, just as 
hail, snow, ice, and vapor are reduced to the com- 
mon element of water. On this theory all those dis- 
tinctive truths which, while they have separated 
men into denominations, have yet exercised a 
Saving virtue, are made nebulous and undiscern- 
ible. What was intended to be a Body becomes a 
mere jelly. 

Others have sought a basis for unity by way of 
subjugation, by the compelling of all other forms 
to yield to the authority of one. It is a theory 
more widely held than is often suspected, since the 
tyranny which expects unity “by way of subjec- 
tion” may be as characteristic of the tiniest (often 
the most unreasonable) sect as of the Holy Roman 
Empire. There are many other Papacies than that 
which governs from the Vatican. The dogmatism 
of an individual may be even more distasteful 
than the pronouncements of a Council. 

Still another theory is that of federation, in 
which different bodies remain content with piece- 
meal creeds and methods, yet at the same time are 
bound together by that tenuous thread of toler- 
ance which makes creed and cult alike of little 
account. 

By all these several paths unity is manifestly 
unrealisable, fortunately so, since unity brought 
about by wrong premises must be inevitably mis- 
chievous. In the unity which God Himself desires 
there is no losing of oneself, but rather the find- 


176 Tel Uetersat iP auh 


ing of the full self meet for communion with God. 
In the obedience required by loyalty there is no 
servile subjugation to the will of God, but rather 
the free codperation of sons. We may be very sure 
that the shattering of ecclesiastical unity which 
resulted from an attempt to impose upon the 
Church the administrative system of the old Ro- 
man Empire, a system in which the individual 
had no rights, was but the Church’s legitimate 
effort to recover for herself the liberty of the sons 
of God. Equally is it true that the riot of individ- 
ualism which marked the return swing of the 
pendulum must not be regarded otherwise than 
as the seizure of an opportunity by the enfran- 
chised mind and spirit to learn once more the 
corporate life by a voluntary submission to Christ 
in His Church. 

The synthesis of the two movements is to be 
found in the unity which results from the attain- 
ment of harmony, the unity so wonderfully de- 
scribed in 8. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (iy 
15-16) as the growing up of the Church “in all 
things unto Him, Who is the Head, even Christ, 
from Whom all the Body fitly framed together 
through that which every joint supplieth, accord- 
ing to the working in due measure of every sev- 
eral part, making the increase of the body unto 
the building up of itself in love.” 

If we take the time and the pains to consider 
this particular passage, word by word, we shall 
see what a wonderful Epiphany this fellowship 


“The Christ That Is to Be’ 177 


of trained individuals, working together in love, 
must bring to a divided and distracted world. 

It would be the creation of a unity like that 
suggested by Kipling’s story of The Ship that 
found herself. First, we see the ship Dimbula, 
newly and strongly built, capable in each of its 
many parts, yet straining and complaining be- 
cause no part is self-adjusted to its neighbor. So 
rivets and deckbeams, stringers and ribs and cap- 
stan, and everything else, groan and whine and 
murmur till one would have supposed the whole 
ship about to go to pieces. Yet, at last, after 
weathering a tremendous storm, there comes in 
the ship a strange lull, out of which comes a new, 
big, voice. “Who are you?” cries the Steam, and 
the answer returns, “I am the Dimbula, of course, 
and I’ve never been anything else but that—and 
a fool.” 

2. We look forward to a Church which is not 
only One but Catholic. By this I mean not merely 
a Church universally diffused and universally ac- 
cepted, but a Church which has lost no element of 
the full witness given to us to bear. We are in 
many respects, in feeling and in some elements of 
our worship, more Catholic than our many con- 
troversies would lead the world to suppose. One 
has recently said, speaking of what he calls “our 
separated brethren,” “They share with Catholics 
in reciting the Apostles’ Creed, they use the 
Catholic Scriptures, and sing not a few Catholic 
hymns; they give to Jesus Christ, Incarnate God, 


178 The Universal Faith 


a passionate devotion, and seek to make His life 
abundantly available to men not only for individ- 
ual holiness and beauty and power, but for social 
ends of world redemption.” 

All this is true. Nevertheless, the majority of 
Christians are to-day making so much more of 
their differences than of their agreements that it 
is as though they supposed the normal way of 
getting safe to the land of everlasting life were to 
float thither upon “broken pieces of the ship.” 
What a spectacle it is, as compared with what 
might be, to see a whole fleet of rudely con- 
structed and ludicrously navigated rafts and tubs 
and hencoops, proudly marked with sectarian 
badges, holding their precarious way upon the sea | 
of life, where all might be coming grandly into 
port. It is not enough to be shamed into repen- 
tance for our discords, we must also be made 
ashamed of those treasonous eliminations of the 
elements of truth which appeared to us discor- 
dant only because they remained disharmonized. 
It is something to our credit that sectarian ban- 
ners are commonly raised only over neglected 
truths, truths which are transformed into errors 
by lack of proper correlation. But truncated 
truths may become exceedingly mischievous, not 
so much for what they state as for what they 
leave unstated and thereby seem to deny. The 
cure for sectarianism is not in a spineless religion 
without theological affirmation or a sense of or- 
der, but rather in that real Catholicity, worthy 


“The Christ That Is to Be’ 179 


of the name because expressive of the thing,—no 
exploitation of a solitary principle, but the reali- 
zation, in principle and practice, of “the whole 
counsel of God.” 

3. Lastly, we need a Christianity which keeps 
prominently before the attention of men its gen- 
uinely spiritual quality. We need not so many 
wheels but “the spirit within the wheels.” The 
tendency of recent years, particularly since the 
craze for efficiency came in with the war, has been 
to make the machinery of religion more and more 
complicated and to have that machinery driven by 
technically trained men and women who keep it 
going by humanly generated forces such as are 
often startlingly foreign to the spirit of Christ. 
The craze for up-to-date Church organization, 
with a multitude of societies to enlist the energies 
of men, women, and children, ramifying in every 
direction from the congregation to the nation, 
claiming the attention of hosts of secretaries and 
business agents, turning the pastor into a bewil- 
dered director of an administrative system, per- 
petually engaged in inaugurating, sustaining, re- 
viving, and galvanizing into appearance of life 
of a multiplicity of unnecessary organizations, 
has done not a little, while stimulating the physi- 
cal energies of the Church, to diminish its real 
power and influence in the community. I once read 
a story by Bradley Gilman, entitled, Ronald 
Carnaguay, the Story of a Commercial Clergy- 
man, which seemed to me like a transcript from 


180 The Universal Faith 


life. I have forgotten the story, but I remember 
these words of Mr. Gilman’s Foreword: 


“When a Church and preacher ... subordinate wor- 
ship to amusement, and when they test the merit and 
strength of a church and minister by mercantile stand- 
ards, then that preacher and people have become com- 
mercial and sordid; then the higher vision is with- 
drawn.” 


Not a little of the disbelief of the world to-day 
comes from the consciousness of a Church which 
is, in its lust for competitive organization, in its 
foolish habit of depending upon the reputation 
for statisticalized greatness, in its employment 
of methods more ingenious than religious to en- 
trap men to the hearing of sensational pieces of 
self-advertisement, must surely be an _ offense 
against God and a blasphemy against Christ. 

As soon as we turn the whole force of our min- 
istry and the love and activity of our congrega- 
tions into the task of spiritualizing the atmos- 
phere of the communities in which we dwell, men 
will not be slow to appreciate the savor of our 
witness. To withdraw from the noisier world into 
the secret place wherein power is generated for 
the whole world’s uses is not to relinquish the ser- 
vice of an active life. It is rather to manifest that 
new and higher type of activity which is not the 
less real for being primarily spiritual. Something 
will happen such as Browning has described in 
his poem, How it strikes a contemporary, where 
the poor poet, in his shabby suit, becomes recog- 


“The Christ That Is to Be’ 181 


nized as the great, though silent, influence which 
shapes the affairs of a city: 


“Tf any hurt a horse, you felt he saw; 

If any cursed a woman, he took note; 

Yet stared at nobody,—you stared at him, 
And found, less to your pleasure than surprise, 
He seemed to know you and expect as much.” 


So he became known as— 


“The town’s true master if the town but knew, 
We merely kept a governor for form.” 


And when he came to die, it was clear,— 


“Here had been, mark, the general in chief 
Through a whole campaign of the world’s life and death, 
Doing the king’s work all the dim day long.” 


When we grow to this conception of Christian 
witness, then, as the mountain lifts itself to catch 
the dew which refreshes the land all the way from 
the heights of Hermon to the arid hill of Zion, 
so shall the Church lift herself in sustained prayer 
into the presence of that divine mystery whence 
is distilled grace for the helping and the healing 
of all mankind. 

We need have no misgiving as to the future of 
the Church, provided we be ready and obedient 
to follow the beckoning hand of the Church’s Lord. 

Faithful and fearless, gratefully mindful of 
the past, yet ever confident as to the future, pan- 
dering to no man or movement or age or race, 
yet bearing in her hands unfailing consolation 


182 The Universal Faith 


for all, patient with the frailties of men and with 
the mysterious providences of God, firm to main- 
tain and free ever to re-state, the Church need 
never heed the cry of the panic-mongers that “the 
foundations are being cast down” and that we 
must therefore “fiee as a bird unto their hill.” 

The vision of the New Jerusalem is in our 
hearts, and the power to build up on earth accord- 
ing to the pattern revealed from heaven is in our 
hands. It is ours to resolve, and to work until the 
resolve be realized : 


“Bring me my bow of burning gold; 
Bring me my arrows of desire; 

Bring me my spear, O clouds, unfold, 
Bring me my chariot of fire! 

I will not cease from mental fight, 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hands, 
Till I have built Jerusalem 

(Within this) green and pleasant land.” 


CHAPTER IX 


THE TRIUMPHANT ISSUE 


“Others mistrust and say, ‘But time escapes; 
Live now or never!’ 

He said, ‘What’s time? Leave now for dogs and apes! 
Man has Forever.’ .... 

Was it not great? did he not throw on God 
(He loves the burthen)— 

God’s task to make the heavenly period 
Perfect the earthen? 

Did he not magnify the mind, show clear 
Just what it all meant? 

He would not discount life, as fools do here, 
Paid by instalment. 

He ventured neck or nothing—heaven’s success 
Found or earth’s failure: 

‘Wilt thou trust death or not?’ He answered ‘Yes.’ ” 

—Browning, The Grammarian’s Funeral. 


“Quod Deo non perit, sibi non perit.”—S. Augustine. 


SYNOPSIS 


Doubts on two points—the cosmic insignificance of our 
planet—Can the Universe be Christocentric?—the chal- 
lenge accepted—the processes of evolution within our 
mental reach—the universality of the laws we know— 
no need to be agnostic as to the issue. 


183 


t 


184 The Universal Faith 


Are we limited by terrestrial experience?—a practical 
question—the question of immortality not an academic 
one—how life climbed out of the water—how it may 
climb out of the present bondage to matter. 

In the interest of present values—why man needs “‘to 
be continued in our next’—the orchard of ripe plums— 
the proper place of “other-worldliness’—the terrestrial 
interest of religion—‘“on earth as it is in heaven”’—‘a 
new and better world.” 

Yet in itself unsatisfactory—material progress a new 
anthropocentricism—“I care for nothing, all shall go”’— 
Is the human victory illusory? 

The need of a transcendental patria—‘Quaere super 
nos’’—the purposive nature of man. 

Views as to the future life—lack of finality in our con- 
ceptions—character of the misconceptions—and the re- 
sult—how we remain the slaves of our metaphors—what 
we expect of heaven. 

Relation to the doctrine of the Incarnation—human 
faculty lifted up into the life of God—fulness of loye— 
of knowledge—of work—‘our heart’s desire.” 

Limitations of Browning’s presentation—from the 
anthropocentrie to the Christocentric—our place in the 
Cosmos. 

The philosophy of the Divina Commedia—‘“the love 
that moves the sun and the other stars’—an educable 
universe—the place of judgment in the moralizing of 
life—three attitudes of the human will to the divine pur- 
pose—the Inferno—the Purgatorio—the Paradiso—di- 
vine respect for personality—the Hound of Heaven— 
God’s fidelity to His primal purpose—the Divine insis- 
tence on the relation of the individual to the whole—the 
paradox of multiplicity in unity—sin a failure in fellow- 
ship—purgatory education in fellowship—Paradise the 
fullness of fellowship—‘What does it take to make a 
rose ?”—the greatness of the vision—God’s witness in the 
dark—our contemplation of the goal—‘“Worthy is the 
Lamb !”—‘“‘Hallelujah to the Maker!” 





The Triumphant Issue 185 


[* the following of our argument up to the pres- 
ent point, doubts have probably occurred to 
the reader with respect to two things. First, is it 
thinkable that in a Universe in which, as we now 
conceive it, distances must be reckoned by light 
years rather than in millions of miles, our so 
shrunken system can possibly have attributed to 
it so much importance as to warrant us in saying 
that the drama of humanity can ever be anything 
more than a very insignificant episode in the cos- 
mic epic? Secondly, is it thinkable that out of in- 
finite tracts of time corresponding in their im- 
measurable vastness to the infinity of space, the 
one human Life to which we have assigned cen- 
tral position can justly claim that focal impor- 
tance, as set forth in the vision of the Lamb in 
the Book of Revelation, or pictorially in the great 
Altar-piece of Ghent? In other words, in taking 
such a position, may we not be returning to the 
old geocentric and anthropocentric cosmogony of 
pre-Copernican days, and reverting to obsolete 
views as to the significance of the history of the 
Jews among the nations of the world? 

I do not think we need fear either challenge. 
The great expression points of evolution, even 
when outside the field of history, are not beyond 
our mental reach. If we can reach back mentally 
to conceive of that crossing of the Rubicon in Na- 
ture involved by the transition from atom to cell, 
and again from body to mind, there is no occa- 
sion for disowning, out of a kind of mock humil- 


186 The Universal Faith 


ity, the crossing of the line which separates the 
human from the divine, through God’s completer 
projection of Himself into our world and the lift- 
ing up of humanity to God. It seems just as 
legitimate to credit Evolution with the securing of 
new values as to emphasize the conservation of 
values already revealed. 

This history of other parts of the Universe we 
may not know, nor the conditions under which 
life prevails, if indeed it does prevail. But, start- 
ing from that first-hand knowledge of self which 
sets us forth along the road, and using the powers 
of observation and generalization by which our 
knowledge grows from more to more, we do get 
scientific warrant for believing that the same laws 
do operate throughout the universe. In such case, 
that law of sacrifice, which, as we have seen, is 
the law of Creation as well as the law of Redemp- 
tion, makes the “slain Lamb” not merely the sym- 
bol of an historic fact but the illustration in time 
of an universal law. It is no true humility to deny 
the laws we see at work in the chemistry of a 
drop of water because we fear to assume their 
relation to the elements in other worlds. Agnostic 
as we must needs be in many things, there is no 
need to be agnostic in the face of revelations 
which come from God, whether they come through 
the observation of nature or through the experi- 
ence of grace. Sir Oliver Lodge seriously under- 
states the intimations we have of human destiny 
when he writes as follows: 


The Triumphant Issue 187 


“Our present state may be likened to that of the hulls 
of ships submerged in a dim ocean among many strange 
beasts, propelled in a blind manner through space; proud 
perhaps of accumulating many barnacles as decoration; 
only recognizing our destination by bumping against 
the dock wall. With no cognizance of the deck and the 
cabins, the spars and the sails; no thought of the sextant 
and the compass and the captain; no perception of the 
lookout on the mast, of the distant horizon; no vision of 
objects far ahead, dangers to be avoided, destinations to 
be reached, other ships to be spoken with by other means 
than by bodily contact ;—a region of sunshine and cloud, 
of space, of perception, and of intelligence, utterly inac- 
cessible to the parts below the water-line.” 


Undoubtedly, some part of our nature is thus 
below the water-line, but to suppose this is true 
of the whole is as derogatory to the Evolution 
which uses our deliberate and purposeful plan- 
ning as well as the accidents of life as it is to 
the conception of the Creator’s relation to His 
world. 

The question which immediately concerns us 
in the present chapter is this. Does the plan, 
whose curve in a certain direction our study of 
history enables us to discern, extend beyond the 
terrestrial sphere? Is it true, from the “august 
anticipations, hopes, and fears” of our present 
experience, that our real self demands for its 
proper destiny something which must necessarily 
transcend its terrestrial manifestation ? 

It is a question which requires consideration 
for practical considerations of the first impor- 
tance. 


188 The Universal Faith 


We may never be able to demonstrate scientifi- 
cally the continuance of personal existence be- 
yond the grave, although in recent years men of 
Science not a few have become more and more 
sanguine as to such a possibility. But indepen- 
dently of the reality or unreality of communica- 
tions with the dead, and independently of all ar- 
guments of a strictly scientific character, the 
theory of personal survival is so reasonable and 
so much in accord with the demands and intui- 
tions of our nature, that the shaping of the pres- 
ent life on any other hypothesis must inevitably 
limit the range of our hopes. According to Dr. 
Hoffding, of Copenhagen, the whole progress and 
course of evolution is to increase and intensify 
the valuable, “and it does so by bringing out that 
which was potential or latent, so as to make it 
actual and real.” 

In any case, the denial, in the name of science, 
of the possibility of persisting personality is 
gratuitous. As Mr. Wells points out in the early 
part of his Outline of History, there was a point 
in the evolution of life when that life was asso- 
ciated with water, as its home, its medium, and 
its fundamental necessity. It seemed demon- 
strable that life must perish as soon as living 
things learned to climb above the water-line, just 
as jelly-fish dry up and perish on the sea-beaches. 
Yet there was some instinct in the climbing which 
proved victorious over the menace of death. Life 
did climb and succeeded in adjusting itself to 


The Triumphant Issue 189 


other conditions beyond the water-line. It is at 
least as reasonable to believe that this will prove 
true of the life which has become valuable enough 
to the cosmic purpose to pass beyond the condi- 
tions of its present physical organism. As Mr. 
J. A. Hadfield has put it: 

“The mind may henceforth become indifferent to the 
disasters which, in the course of nature, are bound to 
overtake the body, and may hope to survive its destruc- 
tion and decay—and perhaps thereafter to find or create 


for itself a ‘spiritual body’ adapted to a different sphere 
of existence and to other modes of life.” 


All this, however, is a little foreign to the 
method of this chapter, which is to direct atten- 
tion, in the interest of present values, to the bear- 
ing of the doctrine of immortality upon our con- 
ception of the cosmic plan and our own attitude 
towards the process of its fulfilment. 

Man is, if the highest of created things, the 
most unfinished, considering the extent and de- 
gree of his ambitions and desires. We must con- 
fess with Cleon: 


“We know this, which we had not else perceived, 
That there’s a world of capability 

For joy, spread round about us, meant for us, 
Inviting us; and still the soul craves all, 

And still the flesh replies, ‘Take no jot more 

Than ere thou climbest the tower to look abroad!” 


Nothing in nature needs so much as man the 
parenthetic notice at the close of the mortal chap- 
ter, “T'o be continued in our next.” 

Otherwise the question occurs insistently, Is re- 


190 The Universal Faith 


ligion after all just a soporific, to keep us up to 
our several tasks for a few short years, serving 
Nature’s obscure and possibly suicidal purpose, 
deluding the individual with the dream of a moral 
progress for which life is inadequate, and the race 
with a vision of a millennium which the planet 
will regard indifferently, but all really to keep 
the poor more or less content with their lot and 
the strong secure in their privilege? One is re- 
minded of the Chinese Emperor who deceived his 
thirsty army, passing through a desert, and at the 
same time carried out his own plan of campaign, 
by telling the troops that just beyond the day’s 
march was a fine orchard of ripe plums. There 
were no plums, but the thought of plums so made 
their mouths water that the thirst was tempo- 
rarily assuaged. Is Nature dealing thus with us? 
Or are we keeping up the fiction of another life 
for policy’s sake of our own, to console the un- 
fortunate and to restrain the wicked? 

Of course, we must be very careful not to give 
undue and misplaced prominence to this doctrine 
of a future life. The kind of ‘“other-worldliness” 
which has been sometimes preached as Christian- 
ity seriously misrepresents the teaching of Christ. 
The Christian who sings, or talks, overmuch about 
being “weary of earth,” not only gives reason for 
throwing suspicion upon his sincerity, but, if 
sincere, may be likened to the philosopher who 
as a result of overmuch star-gazing fell into a 
well at his feet. 


The Triumphant Issue 19] 


We cannot accept the belief of Rudolph Eucken 
that as the Beyond has retired more and more into 
the background, we have needed it less and less, 
and that the doctrine of immortality has lost its 
firm roots in the soul of the modern man. But we 
can most unreservedly accept his statement that 
since our life must be rooted in an order raised 
above time, “it can only reach its more inner 
meaning through work in time and the experi- 
ences of time.” “That such a change sets the im- 
mortality problem in quite another light is plain 
without further discussion.” 

It must be kept clear that the Christian relig- 
ion has a very definite terrestrial interest. There 
was a definite promise in the song of the angels 
at Bethlehem that the coming of Christ meant 
“peace on earth to men of good will.” The preach- 
ing of “the Kingdom” was distinctly the procla- 
mation of an order which, though heavenly in 
origin, was to be set up on earth. The Lord’s 
Prayer makes emphatic reference to the need that 
God’s Name must be hallowed, His Kingdom come, 
His Will be done, “on earth, as it is in heaven.” 
As seen by the Apocalyptist, the City of God does 
not bear the redeemed away into the heavens, but 
comes down from thence “like a bride arrayed 
for her husband.” 

Hence the effort of: the true Christian must 
necessarily be to make what is called “a new and 
better world.” It must be the concern of the Chris- 
tian and of the Church to induce the manifesta- 


192 The Universal Faith 


tion of better business, better politics, better so- 
cial conditions, better education, a wider exten- 
sion of happiness and health. The effort to trans- 
form will be itself transforming. The very vision 
of the future life must be turned to account, not 
by intensifying our dissatisfaction with the pres- 
ent, but to flood with light from the High and 
Holy Place the darkest corners of the earth in 
which our lot is cast. Men will believe most in a 
heaven to come when they see its ideals operating 
for the celestializing of terrestrial conditions. So 
Dr. R. A. Holland finds his vision of the future 
vindicating itself in the present: 

“Even now its streets turn to gold under errands of 
duty; and its meanest hovels shine like celestial man- 
sions when the heavenly Father’s children are greeted 
in their doorways; and its works, and cares, and sym- 
pathies,—the farm, the shop, the mill, the wharf, hos- 
pitals and schools and hustings and council chambers 
and halls of justice,—all have tints and lustres that fit 
them for foundation gems in the City of God. Immortal- 
ity has begun.” 

Yet in itself the humanizing and Christianizing 
of a terrestrial civilization must remain a very in- 
adequate goal. To speak of Progress, understand- 
ing it with these limitations, can only be to en- 
visage a new type of geocentric philosophy to su- 
persede the old. All that we can ever boast of 
in the way of progress, be that progress physical, 
intellectual, or spiritual, is ultimately waste of 
time if Nature, which has begun by being our 
mother, is at last to prove the undertaker who 


The Triumphant Issue 193 


buries her children, self-slain, out of her sight. 
Our own planetary history, and therefore every- 
thing which is confined within its limits, is de- 
monstrably secular. However much we plan for 
Progress and boast of the Progress won, we can 
scarcely fail to be haunted by the spectre of the 
final failure, when a cooling sun removes the last 
possibility of continued terrestrial life. Whether 
the ultimate catastrophe be delayed millions or 
trillions of years is of comparatively small im- 
portance in comparison with the verdict which is 
rendered. In the light of hopes excited, enterprises 
commenced, struggles to carry on the soul’s de- 
sire through all experiences of sacrifice and pain, 
how ironical to say of the Divinity which made 
possible so much frustrated faith, and hope, and 
love, “This One began to build, but was not able 
to finish.” 

Or must we postulate of Nature something 
worse than powerlessness, namely, the indifference 
which cries: “I care for nothing, all shall go”? 

In either case, what becomes of all the edifices, 
material and moral alike, which have been so 
painfully reared through aeons of struggle? In 
the light of the final failure, is the effort to carry 
the development of charcter a little above the 
savage plane a matter of any moment? “Why 
urge the long, unequal fight?” if the victory 
towards which we have fought our way is but an 
illusion? 

So we see how inevitably the question reacts 


194 The Universal Faith 


upon our sense of present values. It is made plain 
that, unless we connive at our own delusion, we 
must look beyond the fate of the planet to find 
the sufficient stimulus for the doing of the things 
we instinctively feel to be worth the doing. As 
Humboldt, when present at an earthquake in 
South America, turned his eyes from the quiver- 
ing earth to the waters of the unquiet sea and 
from thence lifted them up to the serene and un- 
Shaken sky, so, when disturbed overwhelmingly 
by the sense of this world’s transitoriness, we 
must look beyond for a Pow Sto, even to gain 
courage for the next step. There is a story of S. 
Augustine of Hippo that one day walking by the 
sea shore towards evening, he began to interro- 
gate his soul. “Why dost thou sigh? Why art thou 
sad?” A voice which seemed to come from the 
water answered: “Seek beyond thyself.” So the 
saint lifted up his eyes to the stars and said to 
them, “Tell me why my soul is sad.” Out of the 
assembled constellations came again the answer, 
“Quaere super nos.” 8. Augustine lifted up his 
soul still higher to the angelic host and put his 
question yet again, and again the answer was re- 
turned, “Quaere super nos.” So he knew at last 
that beyond the material universe, at its primal 
source, was to be found the response to the cray- 
ings of his nature. 

It is a great help to be thus guided, by the im- 
manence of God in our very being, beyond the 
transitory and the imperfect to that which is alike 


The Triumphant Issue 195 


the Source and the Goal of life, to be reassured 
that “the purposive nature of man,” as Profes- 
sor William McDougall of Harvard has recently 
written, “the predominance of mind in the later 
stages of the evolutionary process, the indications 
of purposive striving at even the lowest levels, 
the combination of marvellous persistency of type 
with indefinite plasticity,” are all predictive of a 
destiny beyond the material universe. 

The development of this predictive element is 
of course slow, and here, more than in most cases, 
it is essential that we be exceedingly wary, lest 
in clinging to the outworn things (the superst- 
tiones) we miss the succeeding stages of revela- 
tion. It is therefore wise, as Eucken reminds us, 
to “rule out any representation of the exact mode 
of continuance.” “In order to avoid a pantheistic 
evaporation of the soul-life, we ought not to let 
ourselves be driven into an obstinate dogmatism 
as to the particular mode of life at present exist- 
ing; we have reverently to respect the secret which 
lies over these things and understand that all 
which is asserted about the indoor details of the 
future life can be nothing more than mere image 
and simile.” 

The insistence upon the retention of certain 
outworn ideas as descriptive of the life to come 
has created in the minds of many sheer distaste 
and disgust. It is quite important to remark that 
as many people are bored, if not frightened, at 
the conception of the Christian heaven as are 


196 The Universal Faith 


terrified at the thought of the Christian hell. Our 
truly pitiful ideas as to what constitutes service, 
worship, and joyous abundance of life have quite 
logically made the thought of such continuing 
indefinitely a hideous boredom. The request of 
the child, trained in the hard school of sabbatar- 
ian religion, “Mother, if I’m good, do you think 
I shall be allowed to go from heaven on Saturdays 
to play in hell?” reflects the natural result of 
such conceptions. 

So we get that shrinking from wrong conceptions 
of immortality which is often confused with the 
shrinking from immortality itself. It is quite easy 
to see that such errors, whether throwbacks to an 
earlier stage of belief or the nightmares of our 
own saddling, coming at a time when our sense 
of failure is strong and the courage for renewed 
effort weak, must now and then produce moods 
such as are expressed in the lines of Robert Buch- 
anan: 

“Perchance He will not wake us up, but when 

He sees us look so happy in our rest, 
Will murmur, Poor dead women and dead men, 
Dire was their doom and weary was their quest— 


Wherefore awake them unto life again? 
Let them sleep on untroubled, it is best.” 


Or the still gloomier and more rebellious lines 
of James Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night: 


“We do not ask a longer term of strife, 
Weakness, and weariness, and nameless woes; 
We do not claim renewed and endless life, 

When this which is our torment here shall close, 


The Triumphant Issue 197 


An everlasting, conscious inanition! 
We yearn for speedy death in full fruition, 
Dateless oblivion and divine repose.” 


Of course, when the present life has become “an 
everlasting, conscious inanition,” one wants no 
more of it. Thus we are taken straight back to the 
atmosphere of earlier times when the intuitions 
of men regarding the future were so little valued, 
—when even for a while (as under Yahwism) 
teaching respecting the future was suspended, till 
a new sense of the quality of life could be imparted 
by a quickened belief in man’s kinship with God. 
In order to escape this reaction from a miscon- 
ceived finality in the doctrine of the future life, 
we must be always pressing on from the symbol 
to the thing symbolized. 

As in the advance from primitive religion men 
began to have higher hopes than those for the 
gathering place of ancestral shades, or for the 
happy fields where hunting and fighting were 
life’s main activities, and it was a pleasure to 
quaff mead from the skulls of one’s enemies; as 
in Zoroastrian religion heaven became a series of 
spheres graded to reward men for particular 
kinds and degrees of merit ritually acquired ; and 
as in Buddhism and Hinduism men passed on to 
a conception of heaven all too perilously access- 
ible to the assaults of Karma, dragging the soul 
down again into the vortex; so in the Christian 
dispensation men have passed under the tyranny 
of the very symbols they required for their concep- 


198 The Universal Faith 


tion of the life of blessedness, and have needed 
emancipation from the same. 

In the first Christian centuries these concep- 
tions were crude in the extreme, holdovers from 
various stages of Jewish eschatology, intrusions 
from the mythology of Greece and Rome, millen- 
nial dreams from the Far East. Many held views 
as materialistic as the one described by Papias 
wherein the Kingdom was little but the gigantic 
vine with a thousand branches, each branch with 
a thousand bunches of grapes, and each grape 
bursting with a superabundance of delicious wine. 
There was little to choose between the heaven of 
this pattern and that of Muhammad which so well 
recommended itself to the Arabs. 

To these ideas we are still so close as inevitably 
to suffer from the literalism with which so many 
are content. It is astonishing to find how much 
the “eternal primitive” still demands of God re- 
ward in the shape of actual harps, and crowns, 
and palms, and robes, and streets of gold. 

But, coincident with the crudest literalism, we 
find real lines of aspiration suggested, in accor- 
dance with our several needs. 

To one, heaven is essentially rest, after toil, 
the folding of quiet hands after a life-time of cark, 
and care, and grinding drudgery. 

To another it is the aspiration towards fuller 
activity, after a life of restraint and frustrated 
effort. 


The Triumphant Issue 199 


To another it means fuller knowledge, after a 
vain beating against the enticing mysteries of 
existence. 

To another, hampered and fettered by the clog- 
ging weight of a besetting sin, it speaks of free- 
dom, advance in moral strength, and holiness. 

To another it means greater amplitude of life; 
to another greater fulness of joy; and to still an- 
other larger opportunities of fellowship. No sym- 
bols, however faulty, can completely disguise the 
essential validity of these aspirations after life, 
since all ask for fulness and “the glory of going 
on and still to be.” 

It is ours to recognize the wonderful way in 
which Christianity has stimulated the desire and 
quest for these things and at the same time spiri- 
tualized the terms in which these desires are ex- 
pressed. 

This is, of course, the result of the proclama- 
tion of the Incarnation. The enlargement of hu- 
man life to touch the life of God is the immediate 
consequence of a doctrine revealing how God has 
stooped to have contact vitally with His world. 
There is no longer reason for being jealous of the 
immortal gods, keeping to themselves the draught 
of immortality and refusing the least drop of an 
overflowing chalice to men. A divine fulness has 
become our right, since God has established His 
right to immanence in Creation. 

It is on this ground of the Incarnation that 


200 The Universal Faith 


Browning in particular, among modern poets, has 
insisted so passionately on life’s enlargement. 
Love must necessarily fulfil itself because of its 
very likeness to the love of God ;— it is no longer 
blasphemy to say: “O thou soul of my soul, I shall 
clasp thee again, and with God be the rest.” 
Knowledge shall have its full fruition, so that 
here below, without distrust or impatience, we 
may do our work, even underground work, never 
to be revealed to, or rewarded by, men, “aiming 
at a million” which God has not placed outside 
our reach. Work of every worthy sort is made 
possible because in line with what God requires 
from His partners. The artist in John Masefield’s 
poem, Dauber, who, striving for the knowledge 
and skill to paint aright the sea-scape, works as a 
common sailor and falls from the slippery mast, 
expresses a tremendous truth when he cries: “It 
shall go on.” 


“The eager faces glowered red like coal; 
They glowed, the great sea glowed, the sails, the mast. 
‘It will go on,’ he cried aloud, and passed.” 


Even our unfulfilled hopes, nay, our very failures, 
have promise of consummation in the hope: 


“All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall 


exist ; 

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor 
power, 

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the 
melodist, 


When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 


The Triumphant Issue 201 


The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too 
hard, 

The passion that left the earth to lose itself in the sky, 

Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; 

Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and 
by.” 

Perhaps Browning fails to give the complete 
Christian expression of the doctrine of immortal- 
ity because he is too much concerned with the 
implications of the Incarnation as they bear upon 
the development of the individual human life. The 
desire of reunion with a loved one, or the desire to 
fill one’s cup of knowledge, must not be placed 
out of relation with the fulfilment of the eternal 
purpose in which each individual perfection has 
its place. The Christian faith which looks to 
heaven as the mere opportunity for gaining per- 
sonal ends, however exalted, is as defective as the 
Buddhism which makes nothing at all of these 
individual perfections. The purpose which goes 
on is that we have called cosmic, and we go along 
with it because the cosmos is not complete with- 
out its parts, particularly those parts which repre- 
sent the supreme gains of the evolutionary proc- 
ess. 

One Christian poet, and one only, has given us 
the needed synthesis, and one turns gladly to the 
great Florentine, who, with wings more divinely 
strong than those of any Icarus, has soared into 
the upper regions of Christian philosophy, that 
he may suggest for us something of the compre- 
hensive sweep of the religion of Christ as it bears 


202 The Universal Faith 


upon the world of reality. In Dante’s Divina Com- 
media. I find the thought with which to close this 
brief and imperfect survey of a great subject. We 
find here the dramatization of most of what I 
have tried to say. 

The poet’s theme is the infinite energy of the 
Divine Will, fulfilling the purpose of Divine Wis- 
dom, sustained by the inexhaustible force of Al- 
mighty Love, “the love that moves the sun and 
the other stars.” 

All this, the expression of the very nature and 
character of God, is seen operant on the cosmic 
material which, however apparently refractory, 
has affinity with the Will, Reason, and Heart of 
God. But the created will is as yet weak and er- 
rant, the created reason gropes with unopened 
eyes, the created love is as yet self-centred and 
imperfect. If Creation, according to the Divine 
plan, is to be taken up into partnership, that the 
Universe may become Cosmos, one harmonious 
and perfected whole, God must lift His work to 
His own level. How may this be effected? To lower 
the divine standard in order to make the creature 
inheritor of a heaven less splendid than the dwell- 
ing place of God, is to do violence to the fidelity 
of the Creator to His plan and to contradict the 
optimism of Almighty Love. To crush the creature 
into servile compliance with the Supreme Will is 
to do violence to the freedom which is part of the 
essential endowment of man. 

What other course is open conceivably except 


The Triumphant Issue 203 


the process of divine education, which employs 
judgment as the means of holding up before the 
eyes of men the standards of divine holiness and 
trains men to aspire to and to love these stan- 
dards by the patience and faith and love which 
represent the method of the Cross? 

Hence the destiny of each and all must be 
viewed in relation to man’s attitude in the pres- 
ence of God’s inexorable love. The will that re- 
volts against the eternal law, thinking that by 
persistence in revolt it may either be left free to 
sin or may gain immunity from suffering for sin, 
must learn the lesson that we are by our very 
nature bound to suffer, not for sinning, but by 
sinning. The rebellious soul must inevitably find 
hell as the reaction of his own attitude to the 
Will which alone is his peace. Then, secondly, the 
will which repents its wilfulness, but suffers still 
from the weakness which the habit of sin has left 
behind, must be sustained and aided, as well as 
disciplined, until this weakness has been out- 
grown. And, thirdly, the will which has, without 
other compulsion than that of love, learned the 
peace which flows from the following of the law 
which is that of its own nature as well as the 
will of God, must enter into that fulness of joy 
in the Paradise which is essentially nearness to 
the Throne of God. 

Two things in all this are held to be fundamen- 
tal. 

The first is that God evermore respects the free- 


204 The Universal Faith 


dom of His creature’s being, even as He must re- 
spect His own. The gains of evolution are in this 
respect absolute, not wantonly to be tossed aside 
out of indifference or despair. God does not create, 
as was supposed of Brahma, worlds which are 
outbreathed in sport and again inbreathed as 
things no more substantial than a mirage. In the 
lowest depths of hell, as well as in the spheres of 
Paradise, the optimism of divine love holds fast 
that which far-seeingness of divine faith launched 
into being. God is indeed “the Hound of Heaven,” 
who through all the aeons follows after the soul 
which is fain to evade Him. That soul must yield 
at last the confession: 

“Halts by me that footfall: 

Is my gloom after all 

Shade of His hand outstretched caressingly? 
‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, 


I am He Whom thou seekest! 
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.’ ” 


Thus it is not merely man’s longing for immor- 
tality which procures its final satisfaction, but 
God’s fidelity to His own primal purpose, His re- 
gard for “His own Name’s sake,” as well as His 
regard for the peace of His children. 

The second point is that on which I have al- 
ready insisted, namely, that God regards all per- 
sonal values as necessarily to be judged in rela- 
tion to the whole. All individual perfection is con- 
ditioned by its fitting into the whole plan. It is 
thus that we are able to round off our conception 


The Triumphant Issue 205 


of the Christian fellowship which we have all 
along been trying to keep in mind. Individual 
evolution and social evolution reach their con- 
summation at one single point. 

The pains of the Inferno are pains such as re- 
sult from man’s selfish disregard of the social 
rights which his sin has violated. In proportion 
as he sins against society does he sink to the 
lowest vortex of self-abasement. The miserly and 
the spendthrift lose their very names, the things 
which most mark man’s individuality; thieves 
lose the confidence which even thieves desire on 
the part of their fellows; liars lose that faith in 
the word of man which even liars realize to be a 
necessary foundation for society. And, at the aw- 
ful focus of the horrible funnel, in the thick-ribbed 
ice, is Lucifer, the last embodiment of self, the 
supreme traitor against the Divine plan, all alone 
but for the three typical traitors he macerates 
in his infernal jaws, Cassius, Brutus, and Judas, 
betrayers of the purpose which would have had 
all men under one rule of Church and State. 

Then as we survey the paths which encircle the 
Mount of Purgatory we see men climbing, and 
learning as they climb the corrective of their for- 
mer sins in the discipline of healing fellowship. 
The proud lean on one another’s shoulders, who 
once chose to walk alone; the envious learn 
through purged eyes to look upon their fellows 
in love. And so on, till all the weakness of sin 
which once kept men separate is done away and 


206 The Universal Faith 


entry is opened into the beauties of the terrestrial 
Paradise. 

Once again, we see in the Paradiso men dis- 
covering their real joy in ever closer fellowship 
as they mount from planetary sphere to plane- 
tary sphere and so towards the Beatific Vision. In 
all the spheres the various forms of celestial 
blessedness are related to some symbol of fellow- 
ship. The theologians who formed parties in the 
lower life are here to be seen hand in hand mak- 
ing the perfect circle of truth, the circle which 
revolves so rapidly that every single truth is 
blended into the great wheel of stainless light. 
The martyrs in the heaven of Mars form together 
the glorious cross of Paradise, that Cross which 
is still the symbol of the redeeming energy of the 
Divine Love. The rulers in Jupiter spell out to- 
gether the motto; “Love righteousness, ye that 
are judges of the earth,” and form the symbolic 
figure of the Imperial Eagle. The mystics in Sat- 
urn make through the fellowship of their eestasy 
the celestial ladder on which angels ascend and 
descend between earth and heaven. So from sphere 
to sphere men’s spirits are carried from one glory 
of communion to another, until at last the goal 
of all desire is reached, where all souls are knit 
together into the great White Rose of Bliss, which 
opens to the light streaming upon it from the 
face of God, and sends up into that face the fra- 
grance of a perfected human devotion. 

What a vision of Creation is here presented, the 


The Triumphant Issue 207 


fruit of all the toil of endless aeons, the victory of 
the patience of Infinite Love, the Rosa mystica, 
with every petal perfect in its individual beauty 
blended into the one perfect form of the universal 
Rose. Surely here is the Rose to which the words 
of the poet apply: 

“What is there hid in the heart of a rose, 

Mother mine? 
Ah, who knows, who knows, who knows? 
A Man that died on a lonely hill 


May tell you perhaps, but none other will, 
Little child. 


“What does it take to make a rose, 
Mother mine? 

The God that died to make it knows. 

It takes the world’s eternal wars, 

It takes the sun and all the stars, 

It takes the might of heaven and hell, 

And the everlasting love as well, 
Little child.” 


It is the making of this Rose which is the plot 
of that Cosmic Epic of which we have been trying 
to follow the development from point to point 
along some small part of the way. Vision may 
well “fail the towering fantasy,”’ however we view 
the stupendous theme, whether we look back to 
a beginning or forward to a consummation. But, 
fail as we may and falter, it must needs hearten 
us to turn our eyes from what is little and local 
to gain even the faintest glimpse of the plan which 
embraces all “from life’s minute beginnings” up 
to the glory of Creator and Creation at one. 


208 The Universal Faith 


It is heartening to discover that all the tremen- 
dous reaches of time when the universe must have 
seemed lifeless and void were still not outside the 
operation of the Divine Spirit; that all the count- 
less aeons when life was slowly climbing out of 
the water and the mire to inherit the dry land and 
the upper air were not to be left to the dominion 
of the dragons that “tare one another in the prime- 
val slime,” but were instinct already with pur- 
pose; that God did not leave Himself without wit- 
ness even in the days when the first appearance 
of man seemed to lead for millennium after mil- 
lennium to nothing better than the Cro-Magnon; 
that in all the ages since our impatience is re- 
buked when we measure the changes our own 
scant history is able to record of the upward way 
and take heart for the ages which are yet to come. 


“This hath He done, and shall we not adore Him; 
This shall He do, and can we still despair ; 

Come, let us quickly fling ourselves before Him; 
Cast at His feet the burthen of our care; 

Flash from our eyes the glow of our thanksgiving, ~ 
Glad and regretful, confident and calm— 

Then through all life, and what is after living, 
Thrill to the music of Creation’s psalm.” 


Did I not say that the ultimate summing up of 
the epic of the Universe must correspond worthily 
with the opening verse of Scripture which pro- 
claims: “In the beginning God created the heavens 
and the earth” ? 

So it is that, looking expectantly towards the 


The Triumphant Issue 209 


goal, we, with all creation represented as the Four 
Living Ones around the Throne, and with the 
Church of all ages and dispensations from the 
first birth of religious emotion, represented by the 
Four and Twenty Elders, and with the Angelic 
host to the uttermost rim of infinity, representa- 
tive of all that les beyond our tiny but most 
significant planet, are able, even though we now 
see but as through a glass darkly and not yet face 
to face, to join in the great Amen Chorus of Crea- 
tion and say: 

“Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain, 


To receive the Power and Riches and Wisdom and Might 
and Honor and Glory and Blessing.” 


“And every created thing which is in the Heaven 

and on the Earth and under the Earth and in the 

Sea, and all things that are in them, heard I say- 

ing: 

“Unto Him that sitteth on the Throne, 

And unto the Lamb, 

Be the Blessing and the Honor and the Glory and the 

Dominion for ever and ever.” 

“And the Four Living Ones said, Amen, 

And the Hiders fell down and worshipped.” 
“HALLELUJAH TO THE MAKER. 
HALLELUJAH, MAN IS MADRE.” 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


(leans following works (by no means all written 
from the point of view of this volume) will be 
found useful as furnishing material illustrating 
the subjects discussed, particularly in the earlier 
chapters. 


The Origin and Evolution of Religion,..E. V. Hopkins. 


Dge Feluge: Sir ccs cede ease ve ad ee Rudolph Otto 
Comparative Revigion .....ccceensee J. Estlin Carpenter 
Ancient Art and Ritual. ......cccccdecwees Jane Harrison 
The GOuLen | BOUT c's 0 ass cicdin gale eee as Sir James Frazer 
The Origin of Magic and Religion ........ W. J. Perry 
The Semitic Religions .. cvssi...ws sels David M. Kay 
The Religion of the Hebrews ......+..0.0.. J. P. Peters 
History of Religtons .. iiss see eldesen RE. V. Hopkins 
History Of ReEUQtONS s. soivii's akin atone ss thes G. F. Moore 
The Mystery Religions and Christianity ...... S. Angus 
The tinknoion: God so vss sk sels 4s ha epee Loring Brace 
The Three Religions Of CRInd oa oc nine cane orice Soothill 
Studies in Japanese Buddhism ............4. Reischauer 
The Religion of the Rigveda ........csncsseens Griswold 
Tndlan oTRCGH in vis ain'x held a0 ale wens Ola ee Macnicol 
A Primer of Hindasm ....20.000cscseee H. N. Farquhar 


Christianity and the Religions of the World ..Schweitzer 
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics ....ed. by Hastings 
The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East.... 
ee ee ie ees Cede Fata oie Be Ruane ko ed. by C. F. Horne 





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